#NSMNSS The Facebook Experiment: Upcoming Tweetchat, 07 July 2014

This week has seen a lot of coverage, and controversy, around the 'Facebook Experiment', where users' news feeds were filtered and the impact on their own posting habits analysed.

For a bit of context, you can find the original paper here, an initial article on the research from the Guardian here, a legal perspective here, and a response from the lead author of the paper here. 

We thought this would be a great issue to frame another Tweetchat around as it raises a number of interesting questions for social researchers:

• Is this any different from the regular 'A/B testing' that websites routinely carry out, and how?
• Is accepting 'Terms and conditions' a sufficient indication of consent? If not, what should Facebook (or other researchers) have done? What elements of this research do you think the public are more concerned about?
• What was the role of academics involved in the study? Despite not collecting the data themselves, did they have an obligation to consider the ethics of they way it was being collected?

We'll be hosting the Tweetchat on Monday 7 July at 4pm (London time), or 11am New York time (See www.timeanddate.com for your time zone), and you can follow the conversation on #NSMNSS where we will be discussing the above questions and related issues.

Please remember to include #NSMNSS and @NSMNSS in all your posts to help us capture all of the discussion. We will provide a transcript of the Tweetchat on our blog following the event.