Fact check
Is it true: Facebook Emotional Manipulation Experiment?
Confirmed100% confidence
Yes — this is confirmed.
Confirmed by the primary source — the published PNAS paper written by Facebook's own data scientists. Facebook did not dispute the facts, only defended the ethics.
The claim
Facebook secretly manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users for one week in January 2012 to test whether emotional contagion could be achieved through social media. Published in PNAS in 2014 without
Key evidence
The PNAS paper itself
Effect size was tiny
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