In 2014, an article in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(
PNAS) described an experiment investigating whether human emotional states can be transferred to others by “emotional contagion”
1. Researchers altered the news feeds of almost 700,000 Facebook users to investigate whether the percentage of positive or negative posts they view affects the tone of those they write. According to Facebook, all users consent to this kind of manipulation when they agree to the company’s terms of service.
Following widespread debate about the ethics of this research
2–
4,
PNASissued an editorial expression of concern, noting that the collection of data “may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out”
5. Facebook issued an apologetic post
6.
That social-media data raise challenges that conventional research-ethics frameworks might not be fit for is an area of ongoing debate
7. Even so, it is concerning to us that, when we read 120 of the more than 1,500 publications citing the
PNAS article (according to Google Scholar), we found that only 11 mentioned ethical concerns.
Data-collection protocols routinely go through several rounds of ethical scrutiny — by funders, reviewers and journal editors. But if ethically questionable work makes it through these procedures and is published, no formal safeguards are in place to ensure that such research is handled appropriately.
We think that this needs to change.
