Facebook‘s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has admitted the company “communicated really badly” about the emotions study it performed on its users without their consent.
It was revealed earlier this week that the social media giant manipulated the news feeds of 689,000 of its users with either an abundance of positive or negative posts, in order to see whether or not this would affect the emotions displayed in the status updates of their subjects.
The study was done without the complicit consent of the subjects and has since prompted outrage and questions about the ethics of the research and Facebook’s conduct. At a women’s business seminar in New Delhi Sandberg explained the research was an experiment as part of product testing.
“It was poorly communicated,” she told India’s NDTV, “and for that communication we apologise.” She emphasised that Facebook takes privacy concerns seriously and want to make sure users have control over their accounts.
“Facebook has apologised and never wants to do anything that hurts users and particularly for communicating really badly,” she said. Adding, “I want to be clear Facebook can’t control emotions and will not try to control emotions.”
The comments came as new broke that several regulators in Europe are looking into whether Facebook broke privacy laws when it carried out the study. A UK regulator has already said it will question Facebook on the matter. Ms Sandberg confirmed that Facebook is talking to “regulators around the world”.
