Legal Issues: Guinea Pigs on the Internet

Abstract

Research experimentation involving human subjects generally requires several levels of approval. There were extensive consent forms that the project staff reviewed with users that outlined the broad purposes of the project, the user's role in the project, what they are going to be doing, any risks, and how the information was to be used. Each of these projects had also been previously reviewed by the research institution’s Institutional Review Board, an often required step when any kind of human testing is contemplated as part of a research project. Emotional expression This system generally works well in the real world, but recent reports about human experimentation using social media have raised concerns about research in the cyber world. In June of 2014, a research report was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) (The research report is available online at http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf html). The research was conducted by manipulating the news feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users based on the “emotional expressions” of the feeds.