London: It has emerged that the US Department of Defence was involved in Facebook’s experiment on users’ emotions. A report on RT.com said that a researcher connected to a Department of Defence-funded programme, which studies the use of the military to quell civil unrest, also participated in the study, RT.com reported.
Social media exploded in anger after it was revealed that FB secretly manipulated posts being seen by 700,000 users in 2012 in order to allow researchers to study how emotional states are transmitted over the platform. The team concluded that “emotions spread via contagion through a network.”
RT.com reported that one of the authors of the study, Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell University, also received funding from the Pentagon’s so-called Minerva Research Initiative to conduct a similar study, “Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”.
The Minerva programme provides cash awards to everyone from “single investigators to large multi-university consortia,” according to its website and includes “researchers from 32 academic institutions, including six non-US universities and four industry or non-profit organizations.”
Separately, ETFdailynews.com reported that the press release from Cornell University on the study said at the bottom, “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.” Asked about it, the university said it was a mistake, the website reported.
