Sheryl Sandberg Apology: Facebook Experiment Wasn’t ‘Meant To Upset You’
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, conducted a science experiment recently involving your news feed. Apparently, she was aiming to see how your mood would be affected when only negative or positive press reached your news feed. When the public discovered what she’d done, it sparked an outrage.
Sandberg apologized, in a way, for her Facebook experiment, saying she didn’t mean to upset anyone.
Facebook has always been known for updating things like privacy settings without telling its users anything about the changes. It’s also well known that they tend to reset your news feed to “Top Stories” despite how many times you tell the site you want “Most Recent.” Yes, Facebook’s tendencies are infuriating at times, but with probably the most versatile mobile messenger ever made and addicting social games that keep us coming back, we seem all too eager to forgive them.
Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg finally admitted an emotional experiment that the site had been conducting with your news feed. It was meant to help advertisers work more effectively, but after realizing we’d been played with, trust issues have given users pause to use the social media site. It might have even backfired with users who regularly avoid negative press.
Sandberg explained:
“This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”
The Facebook experiment was a success though. The more positive news we saw, the better our moods were. The more negative it became, the more angry or upset it made us. Of course, now Facebook users will be much more apt to be skeptical of their news feed.
It isn’t very often that we discover we’ve been trolled by the social media site we use all the time.
THE REUTERS PHOTO FROM SHERYL SANDBERG’S NON-APOLOGY PRESS EVENT IS LITERALLY ¯_(?)_/¯. pic.twitter.com/YuGKBDe5xG
— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) July 2, 2014
In a blog post on Tuesday, Sheryl Sandberg ironically pointed out what’s wrong with a lack of communication between corporations and individuals. We wonder if she knew she was describing what she’d done with Facebook users’ news feed.
The post reads:
“What’s lacking in a world of monopoly and oligopoly communications is accountability. There’s almost none today, and the risks are growing.”
After proving her own point, she turned and apologized for the very thing she was criticizing. We could say she came clean and took her share of the accountability, even if the apology was for your feelings and not for the study itself.
After knowing that your Facebook news feed may have been part of a mood altering experiment, are you ready to forgive Sheryl Sandberg? Are you going to be wondering from now on if the social media site is messing with your feelings to make more money?
[image via forbes]
