Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment as a Challenge to Research Ethics

Jouhki, Jukka; Lauk, Epp; Penttinen, Maija; Sormanen, Niina; Uskali, Turo

doi:10.17645/mac.v4i4.579

Cited by 45 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 63 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In fact, in many cases, people who use search engines may not realize that their interaction data are being collected. We note in passing that routine experiments, such as Facebook’s modification of the order of postings by friends, caused an uproar when they were described in an academic paper [ 16 ].…”

Section: Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical Challenges and Opportunities Associated With the Ability to Perform Medical Screening From Interactions With Search Engines: Viewpoint

Elad

2020

J Med Internet Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has shown the efficacy of screening for serious medical conditions from data collected while people interact with online services. In particular, queries to search engines and the interactions with them were shown to be advantageous for screening a range of conditions including diabetes, several forms of cancer, eating disorders, and depression. These screening abilities offer unique advantages in that they can serve a broad strata of the society, including people in underserved populations and in countries with poor access to medical services. However, these advantages need to be balanced against the potential harm to privacy, autonomy, and nonmaleficence, which are recognized as the cornerstones of ethical medical care. Here, we discuss these opportunities and challenges, both when collecting data to develop online screening services and when deploying them. We offer several solutions that balance the advantages of these services with the ethical challenges they pose.

show abstract

Section: Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethical Challenges and Opportunities Associated With the Ability to Perform Medical Screening From Interactions With Search Engines: Viewpoint

Elad

2020

J Med Internet Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Equally, they signal the existence of clear solutions, externalise responsibility, and obscure the true complexity of the moral problems resulting from socially situated AI. Ethical issues must be concretely internalised by developers and users alike to avoid failures like Cambridge Analytics or the Facebook Emotional Contagion experiment (Jouhki, Lauk, Penttinen, Sormanen, & Uskali, 2016). Experiential approaches (Kolb, 2014) can act as a powerful mechanism, and embedding relevant experiences in a story-world through narrative, and especially role-play, can generate safe reflection spaces as for example Boal's Forum Theatre (Boal, 2013).…”

Section: Artists Addressing Such Ai Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiential AI

Hemment

Aylett²,

Belle

et al. 2019

AI Matters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Experiential AI is proposed as a new research agenda in which artists and scientists come together to dispel the mystery of algorithms and make their mechanisms vividly apparent. It addresses the challenge of finding novel ways of opening up the field of artificial intelligence to greater transparency and collaboration between human and machine. The hypothesis is that art can mediate between computer code and human comprehension to overcome the limitations of explanations in and for AI systems. Artists can make the boundaries of systems visible and offer novel ways to make the reasoning of AI transparent and decipherable. Beyond this, artistic practice can explore new configurations of humans and algorithms, mapping the terrain of inter-agencies between people and machines. This helps to viscerally understand the complex causal chains in environments with AI components, including questions about what data to collect or who to collect it about, how the algorithms are chosen, commissioned and configured or how humans are conditioned by their participation in algorithmic processes.

show abstract

“…Research that interacts with social media users raises additional concerns. For example, Facebook was widely criticized for an experiment to study emotional contagion among 700,000 of its users without their consent or debrie ng, prompting discussion of the ethics of unregulated human subjects research and "A/B testing" by private entities [46,47,48]. And the 2018 disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, in which a private rm harvested information from 50 million Facebook users without their permission, led Facebook to tighten control over its application programming interfaces (APIs), turning it even more of a silo that does not allow for research to be done by outside researchers [49].…”

Section: Ethical Data Re-usementioning

confidence: 99%

Open Humans: A platform for participant-centered research and personal data exploration

Tzovaras

Arvai

Dulaney

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: Many aspects of our lives are now digitized and connected to the internet. As a result, individuals are now creating and collecting more personal data than ever before. This o ers an unprecedented chance for human-participant research ranging from the social sciences to precision medicine. With this potential wealth of data come practical problems (such as how to merge data streams from various sources),as well as ethical problems (such as how to best balance risks and bene ts when enabling personal data sharing by individuals). Results: To begin to address these problems in real time, we present Open Humans, a community-based platform that enables personal data collections across data streams, giving individuals more personal data access and control of sharing authorizations, and enabling academic research as well as patient-led projects. We showcase data streams that Open Humans combines (e.g. personal genetic data, wearable activity monitors, GPS location records and continuous glucose monitor data), along with use cases of how the data facilitates various projects. Conclusions: Open Humans highlights how a community-centric ecosystem can be used to aggregate personal data from various sources as well as how these data can be used by academic and citizen scientists through practical, iterative approaches to sharing that strive to balance considerations with participant autonomy, inclusion, and privacy. BackgroundResearch involving human participants, from biomedical and health research to social sciences studies, is experiencing rapid changes. The rise of electronic records, online platforms, and data from devices contribute to a sense that these collected data can change how research in these elds is performed [1,2,3,4] Among the impacted disciplines is precision medicine -

show abstract

Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment as a Challenge to Research Ethics

Cited by 45 publications

References 63 publications

Ethical Challenges and Opportunities Associated With the Ability to Perform Medical Screening From Interactions With Search Engines: Viewpoint

Ethical Challenges and Opportunities Associated With the Ability to Perform Medical Screening From Interactions With Search Engines: Viewpoint

Experiential AI

Open Humans: A platform for participant-centered research and personal data exploration

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About