Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) research dubbed as “’emotional contagion’ has caused a massive stir around the world and has forced Facebook to publically give an explanation of this experiment that caused hundreds and thousands of people to get manipulated. In an interview on CNBC, Elevation Partners co-founder, Roger McNamee, discussed about this latest problem that Facebook Inc(NASDAQ:FB) is facing these days. In his opinion this is the issue with all the free services over the web.
“When you don’t pay for a service that means you are the product,” said McNamee.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) though has released an online explanation for this disturbing experiment and said that the goal was never to disturb anyone but still, thousands of users around the globe are protesting this experiment that manipulated the news feeds of around 700,00 users. McNamee said that such experiments must be avoided.
“I don’t think there is any question that this experiment was a mistake. It was a mistake at several levels, if you actually look at it, it wasn’t really very successful,” McNamee also said.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) said that the goal was to filter the news feeds without letting the users know and find out the reason behind the posting of the emotional content. But the experts are of the view that this whole exercise was not successful and Facebook has no clear results at hand to deduce anything.
“This is not a Facebook-specific problem, this is a problem of all free services on the web, people have to make money somehow,” McNamee added.
On the other hand, McNamee praised Facebook’s latest steps to empower the user experience.
“I actually applaud Facebook’s more recent actions, where they have given you much more control of the things you see, the ads that are shown to you, and how your data is used,” said McNamee.
CNBC’s senior editor Jon Fortt also commented on this matter and said that the users must be inculcated in any kind of step or experiment that has to do with the user-specific data. He said that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) must learn from its mistakes and such useless experiments and manipulation must be avoided.
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