Update: Facebook Experiments Lacked Support in User Agreement and May Have Included Minors

I posted yesterday about the ethical and possibly legal ramifications of the already infamous emotional manipulation experiment where researchers tweaked Facebook user feeds and studied ensuing user behaviour. The post yesterday gave links to a number of useful accounts and analyses, but I did also mention my own doubt that the research, including the subsequent publication of the findings, was covered by the Facebook user agreement. Today, Kashmir Hill at Forbes reveals that this is exactly what was the case. Not only did the user agreement not include "research", however, apparently Facebook realised what this meant for the defensibility of the study and retrospectively added "research" to the agreed to activities by users after the study's data collection in January 2012. In addition, it is also revealed that the study inclusion criteria did not exclude minors, and since Facebook allow users down to the age of 13, this means that the researchers may very well have been children without their or their parents' consent.

Both of these revelations are, of course, of substantial importance for the research ethical assessment of the study. Not least is the combination rather damaging not only for Facebook and its study leader Adam Kramer, but also for the non-Facebook employed researchers Jamie Guillory and Jeffrey Hancock. This since it may be assumed that the research ethical assessment that was allegedly performed at their universities, Cornell and the University of California, rested, at least partly, on the presumption of consent being implied by the Facebook user agreement. Moreover, this point is especially sensitive because of the possible enrollment of children, as research ethics standards, regardless of area, is especially adamant on rigorous consent procedures and protection mechanisms for children, as it is for other vulnerable groups, and mandatory involvement of their parents or guardians in one way or another, especially when they are below 15 years of age. Possibly, dirt may therefore spill over also on the journal PNAS's responsible editor Susan T. Fiske of Princeton University, whose responsibility it was to ensure the ethical soundness of the article before publication.

That's ethics. But, of course, today's revelation also means that there may be basis for substantial legal complaints. Not least, since Facebook and the involved universities are based in the USA – the heaven of civil lawsuits for astronomical amounts of money – it seems far from improbable that users who where included in the study may join in a class-action suit against (primarily) Facebook and the involved universities. Whether or not there would be grounds for administrative of criminal legal action is more difficult to assess, as I lack knowledge of sufficient details of the relevant sections of US law.

Facebook Emotional Manipulation Experiment: A Collection of Readings

I will not make a real post of my own re the already infamous experiments (initially claimed to be military funded, but that, it seems, was a hoax), where Facebook allowed behavioural researchers to manipulate the allocation of status updates in personal feeds, to study the resulting emotional communicative behaviour of users. My own brief take is that, whatever else may be said on the matter, this is definitely not covered by the user agreement I've signed when joining Facebook. For while I did agree to Facebook testing out all sort of things to improve their service, I did certainly not agree to be a subject in a scientific research experiment, the result of which is published in a scientific journal. I also think that the study may harbour some substantive both methodological and research ethical difficulties, spilling over to not only Facebook, but also the prestigeous PNAS journal's editors, who seem to have taken proof of research ethical review rather lightly... But don't take my word for it, here are four selected sources, not all echoing my views exactly, which may help you make up your mind.

The first one simply set up what the whole thing is about in broad terms, providing a few useful links. The second discusses the scientific quality of the study, which is also important from a research ethics standpoint. The third is an account by a usually brilliant bioethics and research ethics law scholar, discussing the legal ramifications of the study, as well as details regarding what has and should have happened in procedural terms. The fourth is a purely research ethical account by a trusted bioethics colleague of mine. Enjoy!

1. Meyer, R: Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment, from The Atlantic.

2. Grohol, JM: Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods, from PsychCentral.

3. Meyer, MN: Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Controversial Emotion Experiment, from Wired.

4. Hunter, D: Consent and Ethics in Facebook’s Emotional Manipulation Study, from The Conversation.

Now Online: Special Symposium of Public Health Ethics: New Media, Risky Behaviour and Children

All good to those who wait, it's said, and in this case this certainly holds up to scrutiny...

 

Yesterday afternoon, a special symposium in this year's first issue of the journal Public Health Ethics, guest-edited by myself and my colleague Karl Persson de Fine Licht, on the topic of New Media, Risky Behaviour and Children, went online after about 2 years of work, starting with this call for papers. In addition, the call came out of a preceding European project, running 2011-12, taking off as an original idea at a workshop we held in Gothenburg in October 2011. We are, of course, mighty grateful to the PHE editors-in-chief duo of Angus Dawson and Marcel Verweij, who accepted our proposal, remained committed to it and has offered all support needed under way.

The full table of content looks like this:

Introduction 
Christian Munthe and Karl Persson de Fine Licht
Editorial: New Media and Risky Behavior of Children and Young People: Ethics and Policy Implications. Introducing the Themes and Pushing for More 

Original articles
Julika Loss, Verena Lindacher, and Janina Curbach
Do Social Networking Sites Enhance the Attractiveness of Risky Health Behavior? Impression Management in Adolescents’ Communication on Facebook and its Ethical Implications

Joakim Forsemalm
Consolidated Youth Jury: Alcohol Prevention for Young People from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. A Swedish Case Report
  
K. P. Mehta, J. Coveney, P. Ward, and E. Handsley
Parents’ and Children’s Perceptions of the Ethics of Marketing Energy-Dense Nutrient-Poor Foods on the Internet: Implications for Policy to Restrict Children’s Exposure 

Boudewijn de Bruin
Alcohol in the Media and Young People: What Do We Need for Liberal Policy-making?

Case Discussion  

Kate L. Mandeville, Matthew Harris, H. Lucy Thomas, Yimmy Chow, and Claude Seng 

Using Social Networking Sites for Communicable Disease Control: Innovative Contact Tracing or Breach of Confidentiality?

Jasper Littmann and Anthony Kessel 

Accounting for the Costs of Contact Tracing through Social Networks  

André Krom 

From Facebook to Tracebook: A Justified Means to Prevent Infection Risks? 

Mart L. Stein, Babette O. Rump, Mirjam E. E. Kretzschmar, and Jim E. van Steenbergen 

Social Networking Sites as a Tool for Contact Tracing: Urge for Ethical Framework for Normative Guidance

David M. Shaw 

Communicating About Communicable Diseases on Facebook: Whisper, Don’t Shout  

Thomas Ploug and Søren Holm 

Take Not a Musket to Kill a Butterfly—Ensuring the Proportionality of Measures Used in Disease Control on the Internet

Now, I would myself very much have preferred to have the entire issue open access, for anyone to probe, but since that would cost about €1500 / article, and there are 11 articles in the symposium, there was no financially feasible way of managing this. One of the contributions is open access, due to it having been written in a context where funding for that objective has been available, but this is normally not the case for ethicists, social scientists and practitioners – unlike our more wealthy cousins within clinical and laboratory health science, I might add.

For access, your best bet is through a university library, a student or staff at a university with access, or you can try contacting individual authors and/or look around for so-called postprints posted in public archives.