On Friday the US supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. If you are a social media user - particularly on Facebook - you would have noticed the immediate inundation on profile pictures being drenched in extravagant rainbow colours following the ruling.
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The filter placed over the profile pictures is a representation of support for marriage equality. In the first few hours of this application becoming available by Facebook, over one million people took to staining their ‘selfies’ multicoloured in a demonstration of pride.
While some simply see the action as a corroboration, others are questioning whether it is another ‘ploy’ by Facebook to enact another experiment on its users.
In 2012 Facebook secretly conducted an experiment on over 151 million of its users. It looked at 1 million users’ status updates, rating them as positive or negative, they then studied the emotional responses of those users’ 150 million friends. Basically what they found was happy updates lead friends to suppress their negative posts, and your negative posts lead them to suppress their happy ones. The experiment aimed to determine whether the company could alter the emotional state of its users.
When you participate in any online activity you expect to have in one form or another, a violation on your psyche; advertisement specifically tailored to your search habits and search results catering to your location, most of the time these tools are quite helpful.
However, where is the line between tailored and invasive?
It seems quite an obvious result to me that Facebook researchers would find that by filtering only negative posts to your feed would make you feel negative; but what about the young teenager alone in their room being bombarded with constant negativity.
Facebook researchers are constantly experimenting on us, one of the more interesting ones they have performed involved finding out whether they could encourage people to vote.
The experiment was undertaken in the US during the 2010 election to over 61 million users over the age of 18. They offered these users an ‘I voted’ button at the top of their news feeds and info on how to find their closest polling place. Then researchers checked public voting records to see which of the millions actually voted.
And what did they find out? Peer pressure works. Once a friend had ticked ‘I Voted’ they were prompted to do the same and make the effort to vote. The paper that was released post-experiment concluded that their experiment resulted in 340,000 votes that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.
Other experiments have aimed at finding out whether ads work better on you when your friends’ names appear next to them, endorsing them? And finding out how easy is it for lies to spread?
Perhaps all of these experiments can work to better understand collective action and social change online, or whether to see social media solidarity have an adverse effect on political and social change, is it a more passive expression of freedom of speech? Perhaps it fulfills some deep part of the user's’ psyche replacing other action; with all of the above, the question remains - is it ethical and are we downplaying the cost and risk to the user?
Some of these seem extremely interesting and positive, where others seem borderline grey and hazy; I believe as long as we are aware of what is happening we can consciously make the decision to participate or not.
And, getting back to the point at hand, by creating a rainbow-colored profile, are you contributing to the fight for social acceptance or are you just another experiment? Either way, if it is social change that you are after, who really cares
