Gadgetory

a secret experiment carried out by Facebook is causing an uproar among its users the Facebook feeds of nearly 700,000 users were filtered to feature more positive or negative content based on certain keywords like excited they're getting to make them more positive or more negative and what they found is that the way that people talk on Facebook tends to impact the way that users feel the study which was published recently took place over the course of a week in January 2012 it was conducted by two universities and Facebook's data sciences team they need to make sure that they understand their user base so that they can serve us more appropriate ads which is the way that they make money and keep running participants were never notified and that's angered many Facebook is about me and my friends it's not supposed to be manipulated in some way but every user essentially grants the social network permission to conduct these kinds of experiments when they create their accounts there really isn't much recourse other than going to Facebook and deleting your account in a statement Facebook told CNET that it does research to quote make the content people see on facebook as relevant and engaging as possible a big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content whether it's positive or negative in tone facebook also says it has a strong internal review process but that may do little to ease users concerns over future testing in San Francisco I'm Sumi das cnet.com for CBS News