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"  This afternoon, just before the country was heading out the door for a three-day weekend, the journal that published that controversial Facebook study on Monday issued an &amp;quot;Editorial Expression of Concern&amp;quot; about the study. The editor-in-chief of the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\u2014one of the biggest and most important peer-review journals in science\u2014didn&amp;#039;t exactly apologize for the study, and said that &amp;quot;PNAS editors deemed it appropriate to publish the paper.&amp;quot; But she did write: &amp;quot;It is nevertheless a matter of concern that the collection of the data by Facebook may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out.&amp;quot; A little background: On Monday, PNAS published a paper by Cornell scientists investigating whether and how positive or negative emotions spread through social media. To find out, Facebook manipulated the news feeds of about 700,000 users, exposing some to more positive emotions and some to more negative ones. Controversy erupted, but the researchers claimed they did nothing wrong because, in a nutshell, Facebook&amp;#039;s terms of service allow for this. The terms include this statement: &amp;quot;In addition to helping people see and find things that you do and share, we may use the information we receive about you ... for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.&amp;quot; That hasn&amp;#039;t satisfied a chorus of critics, who contend that this research violates the normal standards of scientific experiments. Scientists are supposed to obtain &amp;quot;informed consent&amp;quot; from test subjects and give them the opportunity to opt out. In this case, the PNAS editor-in-chief writes, the Cornell University Institution Review Board decided that the experiment didn&amp;#039;t have to meet Cornell&amp;#039;s own rules because Facebook was the one doing the research, and Facebook&amp;#039;s data use policy allows for this kind of thing. In other words, those rules are Facebook&amp;#039;s idea of &amp;quot;informed consent,&amp;quot; and the only way to opt out is to quit Facebook. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/a11983/journal-controversial-facebook-study-issues-expression-of-concern-16952575/?click=pm_latest>