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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think the main thing the facebook emotional contagion experiment highlights is that our standard for corporate ethics is overwhelmingly lower than our standard for scientific ethics. Facebook performed an A/B test, just as it and similar companies do all the time, but because it was in the name of science we recognized that it was not up to usual ethical standards. By comparison, there is no review board for the ethics of advertisements and products. If something is too dangerous, it will result in lawsuits. If it is offensive, it will be censored. However, something unethical in science, like devoting millions of dollars to engineer and millions of experimental-subject-hours to develop a sugar-coated money-sucking skinner box won't make anyone blink an eye.
I think the core issue is one of lack of understanding how modern technology works. Facebook performed a A/B test and everyone who know how the internet works shouldn't be surprised.
On the other hand there are a bunch of people who don't get that web companies run thousands of A/B tests. Those people got surprised by reading about the study.
There's a lot of criticism from people who definitely understand this, and a lot of people hemming and hawing about how "it's different because it's emotional manipulation" as if most other A/B Testing isn't.
They see the inconsistency, but they don't know how to react; they want to rationalize it.
Maybe it's an issue of politics as the mind killer?
I think it's mostly that scientific ethical standards developed out of a history of bad experiments, but the ethical breeches we think of w/r/t corporations are very different, and the context switch is jarring. Not to mention that the idea of a corporation running a social experiment with a substantially scientific purpose is novel to most people, and this one in particular is easy to understand.
It's not explicitly political.
Given the NSA scandal, the topic of privacy is very much political and a lot of people don't like facebook or other big web companies even when they use their products.
To get back to academia vs. corporations academia openly shares information about experiments while business doesn't.