NOTABLE AF
-The activities of users of Twitter and other social media services were recorded and analysed as part of a major project funded by the US military, in a program that covers ground similar to Facebook’s controversial experiment into how to control emotions by manipulating news feeds.
-Research funded directly or indirectly by the US Department of Defense’s military research department, known as Darpa, has involved users of some of the internet’s largest destinations, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Kickstarter, for studies of social connections and how messages spread.
-Facebook, the world’s biggest social networking site, has apologised for the study, which involved secret psychological tests on nearly 700,000 users in 2012, and prompted outrage from users and experts alike, being “poorly communicated” to the public.
-The experiment, which resulted in a scientific paper published in the March issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hid “a small percentage” of emotional words from peoples’ news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the statuses or “likes” that they then posted or reacted to.
-However, it appears that Facebook was involved in at least one other military-funded social media research project, according to the records recently published by Darpa.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies