Why Facebook's emotion study got it wrong
This week's op-ed columnist argues that Facebook's recent experiment shows they don't understand their own users:
The study doesn't seem to control for the possibility that people simply match their tone and word choice to that of their peers, to avoid being the tall poppy. In the end, it's not clear that Facebook found out anything about emotional contagion. It sounds more like semantic contagion to me.
If Facebook really wanted to make people experience unhappiness, suppressing "positive words" isn't going to do the trick. Emotions are way more complicated than the mere words we use, and it's not always posts with negative words that make us sad.
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