Over the weekend, Facebook was awash with rainbows. People were using a simple profile picture editing tool created by the social networking site in support of same sex marriage.
The ‘Celebrate Pride’ tool was launched to coincide with a US Supreme Court decision that marriage equality was a constitutional right.
Within just a few hours more than a MILLION people changed their profile picture, but many critics were quick to accuse the social network of carrying out yet another Facebook psychological experiment on its users.
As pointed out in this Atlantic article, Facebook is famous for its data harvesting and analysing capabilities and has conducted experiments to manipulate people’s moods and their voting behaviour.
Facebook is very interested in how ideas spread across its platform and in 2013 one of the company’s data scientists studied how a red equals sign (the logo of the Human Rights Campaign) in support of marriage equality became such a popular profile picture.
The researchers found that Facebook users became more likely to change their profile picture to support gay marriage the more their friends did so.
Facebook created a tool that allowed you to change your profile picture in support of marriage equalityFacebook created a tool that allowed you to change your profile picture in support of marriage equality
This is very different from how funny viral videos or memes spread on the social network – we aren’t more likely to share viral videos as more of our friends share them.
What the 2013 research wasn’t able to prove was whether Facebook users were influenced to change their views on a politically-charged human rights issue like marriage equality or whether they already had friends with the same views.
By setting up its own tool to let people change their profile picture, the social networking site will be able to explore this question more deeply.
A Facebook spokesman told the Atlantic that it’s “not an experiment or test – everyone sees the same thing”. In the past it’s shown different people different results to see which messages were more effective.
Carl Miller, a social media researcher from think tank Demos, believes that Facebook genuinely wanted to celebrate gay pride with the launch of the tool, but adds that the company has every right to study how the rainbow pictures spread through the social network.
“I’d be surprised if Facebook did this as an experiment first and then celebrating the historical change second,” he told Mirror Online.
Facebook has a strong track record of supporting equal rights, and the company has been celebrating LGBT pride for a month.
However, he points out that understanding how ideas spread on social media is “one of the most powerful laws shaping the online world” and yet one of the “least understood”.
“It’s really difficult and unpredictable. Facebook carries out experiments the whole time and it would make sense to use this opportunity to see how rainbow pictures spread,” he said.
Article was originally published in the Mirror.
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