How to Run Facebook's Mood Manipulation Experiment on Yourself

When news of Facebook’s attempt to emotionally manipulate its users has emerged, debate quickly focused on the experiment’s ethics. Lauren McCarthy, though, kept thinking about the experiment itself. But as discussion went on, she found that “no one was talking about what the study might mean. What could we do beyond the ethics?”

Now, she has a preliminary answer. McCarthy has made a browser extension, Facebook Mood Manipulator, that lets users run Facebook’s experiment on their own News Feeds.

Just as the original 2012 study surfaced posts analyzed to be either happier or sadder than average, McCarthy’s extension skews users’ feeds either more positive or more negative -- except that, this time, users themselves control the dials.

Unlike the Facebook study, which only surfaced posts judged happier or sadder, McCarthy’s software also lets people see posts that use more “aggressive” or “open” words in their feed. The extension, in other words, lets users reclaim some control over their own feed. It lets users discover what it’s like to wrestle with their own attentional algorithm -- as subtle, or as stupid, as it can sometimes be.