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"Facebook's No. 2 executive said Wednesday that its psychological experiment that affected nearly 700,000 users was \"communicated badly.\"\nSpeaking with NDTV of India, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said that the company's study was just one piece of a larger research effort.\nSee also: Anger Builds Over Facebook's Emotion-Manipulation Study\n\nShe also responded to a question about whether Facebook could control its users' emotions or even attempt to influence elections.\n\"I want to be clear \u2014 Facebook can't control emotions and cannot and will not try to control emotions,\" she said. \n\"Facebook would never try to control elections,\" she added.\nSandberg also reportedly made comments on the study during another press interview, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, although the context was unclear. A Facebook spokesperson said Sandberg had several events and numerous media interviews on Wednesday.\n\"This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was,\" Sandberg said, in comments reported by the Journal. \"It was poorly communicated.\"\n\"We never meant to upset you,\" she added.\nThe outcry over the study has grown in recent days after the publication of a study conducted in January 2012, when researchers randomly selected 689,003 of Facebook's 1.3 billion users and manipulated their News Feeds to display more positive or negative posts. They then observed whether \"emotional contagion\" led those users to write more positive or negative posts themselves.\nA Facebook spokesperson confirmed the comments from Sandberg and added that she directed people to an apology posted to Facebook by Adam Kramer, one of Facebook's researchers who helped conduct the experiment. In that message, Kramer said he was \"sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.\"\n\nPost by Adam D. I. Kramer.\nFacebook has been widely criticized for the study. Outside researchers have said that any users who end up being a part of an experiment should be notified in accordance with scientific ethics. \nThe social network's terms of service inform users that they can be subjects of studies, though Forbes pointed out that those terms were changed four months after the emotions experiment to specify that user data may be used for \"analysis\" and \"research.\"\nSee also: Facebook: Emotion Study Was Customer Service\nBeyond the public outrage, Facebook is also under investigation in the UK over whether the study violated data collection laws.\nSandberg's apology didn't go far enough for at least some users on Wednesday. Commenters pointed to the dissonance between her statement about not meaning to upset people and the purpose of the study, in which some users were intentionally shown a higher percentage of negative posts. Others pointed out that neither Sandberg nor Kramer have apologized for conducting the study.\n\nSheryl Sandberg on Facebook mood study: \u201CIt was poorly communicated. We never meant to upset you.\u201D Uh, yes you did? http://t.co/C9gelEDGRm\n\u2014 Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) July 2, 2014\n\n\n\"We never meant to upset you\" is a pretty horrible apology (from Facebook/Sandberg) http://t.co/ON6WaZk2Ci\n\u2014 Kia Makarechi (@Kia_Mak) July 2, 2014\n\n\n@sfiegerman @mashable Nope, they just meant to study how upset you got.\n\u2014 Sarah Cassi (@SarahCassi) July 2, 2014\n\n\nSandberg apologizes for communication of FB emotions experiment - not for conducting it #FacebookExperimentok http://t.co/CoJkZ1FfNg\n\u2014 Jenny Anderson (@jandersonNYT) July 2, 2014\n\nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=116628718381794&amp;xfbml=1&amp;status=1&amp;cookie=1\",\"facebook_jssdk\");_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/facebook-sandberg-emotions-experiment/>