Facebook has been forced to defend internal research intended to detect when young people using the service needed a "confidence boost."
The 23-page document, first reported by The Australian (pay walled), was prepared by Australian Facebook executives David Fernandez and Andy Sinn for an Australian bank pitch; it's dated 2017 and marked "Confidential: Internal Only," according to Silicon Angle.
Using internal Facebook data, it looked at 6.4 million users who fell into the categories of "high schoolers, tertiary students, and young Australians and New Zealanders … in the workforce."
Looking at someone's account, including "posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity," Facebook detected any number of feelings, including "stressed, defeated, overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, stupid, silly, useless, and a failure."
On Sunday, Facebook defended the move. "The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook," the company said in a statement. "It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated."
Facebook argues that the "premise of the [Australian] article is misleading," and it "does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state." However, Facebook also admits this research didn't follow the "established process to review the research we perform."
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The news comes several years after Facebook was accused of emotional manipulation when a Facebook data scientist and two university researchers altered the content of around 600,000 Facebook users' news feeds to see how people might respond to negative versus positive feedback on Facebook. After some backlash, Facebook pledged to reevaluate how it conducts research and outlined a new framework covering internal and public work.
In the past year, Facebook has also added several suicide-prevention tools to its platform, a component of which uses artificial intelligence to identify and help people report suicidal posts.
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