I generally refrain from posting a comment but the current debate is just getting ridiculous. Its more about people hating facebook rather than any real ethical issues. The worst part being, how the IRB's are invoked as if they are filled with ethical gods. A similar situation has happened before as explained here in the NYTimes article by Atul Gawande http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30gawande.html?_r=...
The key question is at what point is a certain method a quality control decision vs a research experiment. What Facebook did was an internal quality investigation. What are they supposed to do show posts at random, for this to qualify as an "experiment" we need a baseline. In reality there is no such baseline.
The key question is at what point is a certain method a quality control decision vs a research experiment. What Facebook did was an internal quality investigation. What are they supposed to do show posts at random, for this to qualify as an "experiment" we need a baseline. In reality there is no such baseline.