Wednesday Web Watch:
Is a new blog component where we link to a relevant external blog and site and promote the site in a window (to right of our posts) for the duration of the month. This week’s site is The Guardian Headquarters which features an article by Chris Chambers entitled Facebook fiasco: was Cornell’s study of ’emotional contagion’ an ethics breach? Every Wednesday, we extrapolate from each article and raise a legal, ethical or scientific issue in connection with the featured story.
Yesterday, The Guardian Headquarters posted a blog by Chris Chambers in connection with the recent controversial emotions study undertaken by Facebook Inc. and Cornell University, recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As many of you are aware, the study involved tweaking the language content of Facebook news feeds with either positive or negative wording and then monitoring the content of select users’ status updates to gain insight into emotional reactions to negative and positive news feeds. The controversy stems from allegations that informed consent was not provided by the human subjects in anything close to an appropriate manner. There primary sore points that have been flagged relate to, a) Facebook’s terms of service, updated after the fact (to provide for user information for “research”); b) the Institutional Review Board debacle; and c) if Facebook is, in fact, not subject to the legal standards and requirements relating to research involving human subjects, it should, nonetheless, have been more ethically sensitive.
In connection with Cornell’s involvement, Chambers writes that, “publicly funded science is held to a higher ethical standard than comparable research in the private sector. Once academic scientists get involved the bar is raised, never lowered (emphasis added).” In terms of funding, the Cornell Chronicle notes that “[a]n earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.” Given Cornell’s statement and that Facebook is its own enterprise (albeit a public company) public funding (as in money generated by the government to grant goods and services to the general public) does not appear to be truly at issue here. Of interest, however, is whether there should be a difference, as Chambers observes, in ethical standards within the scope of public versus private research? Further, it is not uncommon for “academic scientists” to assist private industry with research and development in an area of expertise. Are these scientists, when acting for a private entity not expected to perform and adhere to the same high standards as they would in, say, a public university setting? Or is it only when academic scientists actually become involved in private research that the ethical bar gets raised within the private framework? Thoughts?