Lawmaker asks FTC to explore Facebook's psych experiment

An angry lawmaker, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) has sent a letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requesting them to fully explore the potential ramifications of Facebook's experiment.

Facebook has reportedly apologized for altering 700,000 users' news feeds as part of a psychology experiment in 2012 but a lawmaker is still angry because of the experiment and he is hoping that Facebook will have to answer to the FTC.

The Facebook study, which was published with the help of Cornell University researchers in the journal PNAS, was meant to study the phenomenon of social contagion, or the spread of emotions between people. Over the course of a week, 689,000 users saw a slightly different version of their normal feeds, with either some positive or some negative stories removed, The Verge reported.

The resulting analysis found that these users correspondingly posted either more positive or more negative updates during the period. But while academic research that involves human subjects has to be approved by a university ethics board, Facebook had no such restrictions, the report said.