A recent, partially Army-funded study conscripted Facebook users as unwitting participants during a weeklong experiment in direct emotional manipulation. The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material.
Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative news feeds posted more negative things.
Surprising? Doubtful. Unethical? Yes.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds, father of Linux on his hobby that ended up changing the world of technology
Just was coming to post this. Here's the actual study: Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Where's the "disgusting" upvote?