Facebook's big problem: Ethical blindness

[Commentary] When you agreed to Facebook's terms and conditions, did you know you were agreeing to become a subject in a psychology experiment? We just learned that Facebook permitted an academic research team to conduct an experiment on a huge number of Facebook's users back in 2012.

The researchers adjusted the contents of Facebook timelines for nearly 700,000 users so that either positive or negative news dominated. They found that positive news spread positive responses, and negative news spread negative responses.

[Phipps is an independent open source consultant and a director of the Open Source Initiative]