The value of the paper is that it's where Facebook first started getting creative: a massive (N=689,00!), barely-consented-to (successful) attempt to sway the emotional states of hundreds of thousands of people.
That's both groundbreaking and constructive, if constructive in a way that harms people who don't have Facebook stock.
It set the stage for so much of what's happening today. Acting like it's just another boring paper is baffling.
You miss a crucial part - none of this are individually tailored to you. Social media is the first form of media that can deliver an individually customized payload.
Are you saying the paper itself is interesting, or that what the paper says about Facebook is interesting?
The actual result (people who see positive or negative messages are more likely to post the same) seems so obvious and uninteresting as not to be worth mentioning at all, though the fact that Facebook was willing to run the experiment and publish the result is perhaps more notable.
Oh my. That would indeed be interesting, if only the method could even have a hope to show such a thing.
From the abstract:
> When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.
Well and good, when people see more positive posts, they post more positively. But then:
> This work also suggests that, [...] the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.
What a leap into the dark that is!
This study cannot show anything about affect, only about what was measured, which is what people posted on Facebook.
Please consider that this stuff is very nuanced, and that while you clearly care about these issues a lot (as do I!), your analysis betrays a lack of understanding.
Any way you want to cut it, these results are not to be trusted. You cannot even be sure the conclusions are true. The effect sizes are within measurement error.
It has an impact if singular events (of which there are millions each day) can severely affect social cohesion and stability. Regardless of what you call it, the inevitability of emotionally triggering events each of which has the potential to reach everyone in real time and impact them will lead to extreme social instability.
Similarly, too many unregulated synaptic connections or overexcited neurons in the brain can cause seizures.
How does it bode for society if, for example, every single instance of racial animosity between people is broadcast for the whole world to see? Even if the rate of occurrence of these sorts of interactions is incredibly small, there will be many per day, driving entire segments of our society apart and causing even more such negative interactions in the future which are just fuel for the fire.
