Facebook is literally messing with your mind

My son sent me this video the other day – he sent it via email with the subject heading “inspiration”.

I am not at all sure what point he was trying to make when he called it that but I really hope that he watched and understood it before he sent it to me. It’s something I try and drum through his head all the time so maybe he thought that this clip was my inspiration.

It certainly could have been.

I didn’t mean to cry at the end of the clip. But I did.

I think it is even more interesting  light of Facebook’s recent social experiment where they intentionally manipulated at least 700,000 users’ news feeds to see how  how changes to these news feeds would affect their emotions.

Daily Dot reports

“Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the paper reveals that Facebook conducted a massive experiment to determine the “emotional contagion” effect, by testing whether reducing the number of positive posts you saw on your news feed would make you less happy.
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To do this, Facebook tweaked its algorithm to make sure some users saw primarily positive posts, some saw negative posts, and some saw neutral posts in their news feeds. They then waited to see whether the emotional content of the posts in users’ news feeds had any effect on what they subsequently posted.

The result? Yes, it totally does: The researchers, who were from Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California-San Francisco, all revealed that users who saw positive posts in their news feeds were more likely to post positive posts themselves, and those who saw predominantly negative posts were more likely to produce negative content.”

Great so now it’s not just our friends on Facebook that are manipulating us.

Sometimes I think Facebook is my window to the world but then I realise I’m friends with the people I am because of who they are. Sadly they’re are not indicative of the world we live in, for instance I’m not friends with people who support the government’s stance on asylum seekers (or almost anything else).

I’m friends with people I went to school with and I haven’t spoken to since, because I am interested to see how they turned out as adults – of course I’ll never know because I do know they probably aren’t being honest. Just like Scott of the video. But I can see that they look as old as I do.

I remember joining Facebook – I remember how excited I was with the concept of connection, especially living in a country so far from “home”. I remember finding people and poring over their profiles searching for clues to their lives. I remember the joy of connecting with people.

I love the fact that my Facebook page allows me to do that now, like my blog does – and Twitter. And even the people that follow the pictures of my dog and my dinner on Instagram. I just wish it didn’t mess with my mind so much