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eiaoa
This needs "(2014)" added to the title.

This appears to be a repost of the famous Facebook study that manipulated people's news feeds: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

pie_hacker
I agree. Although perhaps more infamous than famous.
notJim
Thanks, I thought this was new, and was kind of amazed that they were doing this again.
kevmo
OP here, and I agree. I will keep that in mind for next time. :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
TomJoeJohn
I thought it was common sense
trustmath
Evidence is better than common sense.
[dead] youwindang00
You want evidence that humans are able to be manipulated at scale?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

Etc, etc...

There’s an interesting parallel here. When an obvious thing is granted a software patent because it’s the first time it was done “on a computer.”

Human society has a long history of being gullible and easily manipulated at scale.

Facebook is just tapping into that nature “on a computer.”

StefanKarpinski
An important point about this result: the significance is high because they had a huge population to test on, but the effect size is very small. The effect size is 0.001 which means that if one of your friends posts something negative (or positive), you have a 1/1000 chance of also posting something negative (or positive) as a result that you wouldn't otherwise have posted.
b_tterc_p
Anyone want to do a power calculation for an effect size of 0.001 and a sample size of 700,000?

Eyeballing it, I’m not convinced that’s enough.