Facebook’s Unethical Experiment

[Commentary] Facebook’s methodology raises serious ethical questions. The team may have bent research standards too far, possibly overstepping criteria enshrined in federal law and human rights declarations.

“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. “This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent.” Ah, informed consent.

Here is the only mention of “informed consent” in the paper: The research “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” That is not how most social scientists define informed consent.

There is a vague mention of “research” in the fine print that one agrees to by signing up for Facebook. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me, however, it is worth asking whether this lawyerly disclosure is really sufficient to warn people that “their Facebook accounts may be fair game for every social scientist on the planet.”

Facebook presumably receives no federal funding for such research, so the investigation might be exempt from the Common Rule.

Even if the study is legal, it appears to flout the ethical standards spelled out in instructions to scientists who wish to publish in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Authors must include in the Methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments,” reads one requirement on the journal’s website.