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The Facebook Mood Manipulation Experiment: You Might Have Been a Guinea Pig
Facebook secretly altered the news feeds of 700,000 users to study emotional reactions—without telling them. Find out if you were part of the experiment.
Rare Viral Facts
7/22/20251 min read
In 2014, Facebook revealed it had conducted a psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 users — without their knowledge.
For one week, researchers tweaked users' news feeds to show more positive or negative posts, to see if it would affect their mood or behavior. The goal? To test whether emotions are contagious online.
The result: users shown more negative content were more likely to post negatively — and vice versa.
While Facebook called it a "routine product test," users were outraged. Many saw it as emotional manipulation without consent.
It raised huge ethical questions about tech companies' power and what they can do with your data.
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