Facebook's Secret Social Experiments that you didn't know happened! - Study 1: Rumor Cascades

A former Facebook data scientist who defended the company's 'emotion-manipulation experiment' that was conducted on around 700,000 users sated that Social experiments are happening all the time and its more than likely that every Facebook user has been part of one at some point.

Even you!

Most of the so called "experiments" have been basic A/B testing which you will find is pretty standard on the internet these days and very mundane , IE: which color blue you're mostly like to click or how big an advert needs to be for you to actually notice it .

But then there are some that a quite interesting enough to have case studies written up about it for bringing a new light on human behavior.

Take for instance the first case in my series of Facebook's Secret Social Experiments that you didn't know happened!

Study 1: Rumor Cascades

The idea behind this experiment was to find out the answer to the following question...

How easy is it for lies to spread?

This experiment took place between July and August of 2013

It is unconfirmed how many users were exactly involved.

How they did it was researchers would look at over 200,000 photo comments that were posted to Facebook with Snopes.com links.
Snopes for who don't know is a rumor-debunking site (which has controversies)

This would indicate that the shared photo was an example of someone being tricked , then sharing it and passing it on to their friends, such as people claiming this man was 'Trayvon Martin' at 17 or another would be that Obamacare would be taxing non-medical items such as clothes and rifles.

Then they would look at how viral those photos went.

What Facebook eventually found out was users love spreading rumors. the most crazy outrageous information travels much farther and faster than anything debunking it.

However, researchers also did note that posts that "get Snoped" are 4.4 times are most likely to get deleted.

While its and Interesting case study it is also a stark reminder that Facebook can easily pull these experiments anytime without your knowledge, the reason that was claimed this experiment went ahead was to see how far false information spreads before the true information makes its round debunking the false.

However, I feel as corrupt as Snopes and Facebook have been rumored and in some cases proven to be, the results of the tests can easily manipulated to fit their 'Fake News' aka Censorship agenda.

If you like this please show some support and upvote, and feel free to follow me and next in the Facebook's Secret Social Experiments that you didn't know happened! I take a look at Study 2: Exploring requests for help on Facebook