(Tom: Decades ago I learned that it was not good for one’s outlook on life to watch the news. So I rarely, if ever, do. Seems it was good advice. If you still watch the news can I suggest you experiment for a month and see how different you feel not watching it?)<\/p>\n
This is very dark.<\/p>\n
Harvard professor Rebecca Lemov, an expert on mind control and emotional manipulation, joined Joe Rogan and laid out the disturbing details of a little-known experiment Facebook conducted in 2012:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a famous Facebook experiment I read about that took place in 2012 and was published in 2014, where they announce that they\u2019ve achieved, mass emotional contagion at scale,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Lemov explained that the social media giant ran the test on 700,000 users\u2014without telling them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever you go on the platform, you agree to be tested or AB testing. So this experiment exposed a group to a more\u2014their newsfeed was altered in a negative direction emotionally, as measured by word counting software.\u201d<\/p>\n
The results? Chilling.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd they discovered that that group that had a negative exposure also responded in a more negative way, as judged through their posts and likes and responses.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe group that was exposed to a more positive newsfeed by altering the algorithm then had also a measurably statistically significant effect of more positive emotional response\u2014and the control group was unaltered by this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Facebook was\u2019t just tracking behavior, they were engineering it at scale.<\/p>\n
And nobody was warned.<\/p>\n