What are the possibilities of this new reality in which a private company, responsible only to its shareholders, can change the mood of whole populations? The obvious question: Why advertise at all anymore? There is a direct and quantifiable way to change what society feels. If you are GM, why wouldn’t you simply pay Facebook to remove postings with the word Ford in it and promote posts with GM in it? Why wouldn’t GM and Ford band together to increase the mood for driving? Now, what if you’re a political party? The connection between a sense of economic positivity and the desire to vote for an incumbent is one of the first laws of political science. Well, now there’s a way to change the mood. How much would it be worth for an incumbent president, say, to change the sense of economic wellbeing by altering the newsfeeds of the population of the country? Remember: there’s no cap on donations anymore.
No doubt Facebook is in the middle of reckoning up all these powers. Your Facebook feed, today, could be an experiment in your mood. “Social engineering” is now genuinely possible. What are the social engineers going to dream up? What if Facebook discovered, through the power of emotional contagion, that it was able to reduce suicide among its users? Would it not be, on some level, responsible to do so? What if it was able to reduce smoking by altering the algorithms of “emotional contagion”? I honestly do not want to think of the reasons the research was funded in part by the United States Army Research office. What does the American military hope to do with this ability to control the population’s mood?
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