{"id":11676,"date":"2014-07-01T09:57:35","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T16:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=11676"},"modified":"2017-06-04T12:06:43","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T19:06:43","slug":"data-science-what-the-facebook-controversy-is-really-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/data-science-what-the-facebook-controversy-is-really-about","title":{"rendered":"Data Science: What the Facebook Controversy is Really About"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"authors\"><a class=\"author\" href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/sara-marie-watson\/\" rel=\"author\">Sara M. Watson<\/a><\/span> \u2014 The Atlantic<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Facebook has always \u201cmanipulated\u201d the results shown in its users\u2019 News Feeds by filtering and personalizing for relevance. But this weekend, the social giant seemed to cross a line, when it announced that it <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/message\/engineering-the-public-289c91390225\">engineered<\/a> emotional responses two years ago in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/111\/24\/8788.full\">\u201cemotional contagion\u201d<\/a> experiment, published in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em> (PNAS).<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Since then, critics have examined many facets of the experiment, including its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2014\/06\/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment\/373648\/\">design, methodology, approval process, and ethics<\/a>. Each of these tacks tacitly accepts something important, though: the validity of Facebook\u2019s science and scholarship. There is a more fundamental question in all this: What does it mean when we call proprietary data research <em>data science?<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">As a society, we haven\u2019t fully established how we ought to think about data science in practice. It\u2019s time to start hashing that out.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2014\/07\/data-science-what-the-facebook-controversy-is-really-about\/373770\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sara M. Watson \u2014 The Atlantic Facebook has always \u201cmanipulated\u201d the results shown in its users\u2019 News Feeds by filtering and personalizing for relevance. But this weekend, the social giant seemed to cross a line, when it announced that it engineered emotional responses two years ago in an \u201cemotional contagion\u201d experiment, published in the Proceedings [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64954,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11676\/revisions\/64954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}