When Facebook Messed With Its Users’ Emotions
A piece of social media history worth re-telling as people assess their digital and offline lives
This newsletter is deliberately short. Like, extremely short. Why? I don’t want you suffering a case of memory interference (the concept’s been around since the 1960s, look-up Leo Postman).
Anyway, here’s the point, you need to do this: go onto your YouTube homepage, pick a video, and now scroll down.
Once you hit the bottom of the page, scroll back up – do you remember the first video you selected? If you have, well done. But don’t cheat.
Now do the same task – select a video, and then scroll down – but this time refresh the page. Can you find your video? Good luck.
YouTube never used to be like this. The Google-owned outlet has had to keep up with the other video platforms, most notably TikTok.
The overwhelming tiling of thumbnails is the best it can do to achieve a news feed-style flow for desktop devices.
On mobile, it’s a different story. YouTube Shorts just auto plays videos. You’re onto the next one, then the next one and the next one before you know it.
I like YouTube, but I’ve used it as an example because many people who have been knocking around on the internet for at least a while will recognise these changes too.
The other reason is that sometimes the past is a very helpful measuring stick which we can compare the present against.
Talking of the past, there was a time without screens and cameras in our pocket, a constant connection to the internet and the news feed (patented in 2006).
Social media was usually about private networks, and the content you generated was shared exclusively amongst friends or loved ones – occasionally that also extended to colleagues.
Everything’s changed and now we’re really worried about what Web 2.0 is doing to ourselves and our children. We’ve got news feeds, we’ve got screens, we’re always connected and all of this engagement is being super-charged by algorithms.
What does the algo want? More clicks, more likes, more engagement. We would never now call the internet the ‘information superhighway’, but that’s how it used to be described.
It’s more of a maze of content now. There is an end, but it’s masked by parlour tricks, changes of digital dials which can even impact your emotions.
Social media firms have known about these effects since at least 2014.
Back then Facebook experimented on its own users (689,003 to be precise), finding that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”.
Here’s what exactly went down (link):
“In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed.
“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.
“These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
There was an apology of course (link), but the work proved a point: the news feed and the algo could really mess with people’s heads.
That was more than a decade ago. It might have got worse.
The Political Press Box
Find my latest long-form audio interviews of political communicators here. Please like, subscribe and listen.
📧 Contact
For high-praise, tips or gripes, please contact the editor at iansilvera@gmail.com or via BlueSky (link). Follow on LinkedIn here.
211 can be found here
210 can be found here
219 can be found here
218 can be found here
217 can be found here