experiment

Ok. So Facebook messed with our mojo and never told us about it.

If you’ve been living under a rock – or at Glastonbury – for the past few days, you might be forgiven for having missed the breaking news that Facebook conducted an experiment for one week in 2012, skewing nearly 700,000 users’ newsfeeds to be either happier or sadder than normal by making some sneaky adaptations to its algorithm.

Facebook is a mirror while Twitter is a megaphone.

That is the core of a University of Michigan study into the two dominant social networks and how people use them.

Lead researcher Elliot Panek and colleagues carried out two studies. In the first, college students were asked how they used social media and given personality assessments. Among this age group, narcissists preferred to use Twitter to broadcast their opinions to others.