Reports revealed that Facebook admitted to have “communicated really badly” after a controversial study says it secretly manipulated users’ feelings.
According to reports, the social network’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday admitted that the company secretly altered the emotional content of feeds of nearly 700,000 users for a week in 2012, giving some sadder news and others happier news in a study aimed at better understanding “emotional contagion”.
News has it that the research, published recently, has prompted online anger and questions about the ethics of the research and forced Facebook on the defensive.
Sandberg told a women’s business seminar in New Delhi when asked whether the study was ethical, that it was an experiment as part of product testing.
“We communicated really badly on this subject,” she said, before adding: “We take privacy at Facebook really seriously.”
Sandberg, who was in India to promote her gender-equality book “Lean In” and meet leaders of Indian companies and senior politicians, declined to speak to reporters asking further questions.
The comments, it was learnt came as several European data protection regulators began looking into whether Facebook broke privacy laws when it carried out the study.
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