
Downright Orwellian: journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy - werewolf
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/25/facebook-orwellian-journalists-democracy-guatemala-slovakia
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dustfinger
Facebook should consider having an opt-in feature for user-experience
experiments that could have a high impact on important news reaching the
general public. By having users opt-in they would be aware of the feature that
they were opting in for and therefore there would be less confusion. Users
could be made to explicitly either opt-in or opt-out of the feature being
tested which would increase general awareness of the feature. Users should
also be given the ability to upvote / downvote the new feature in favor of
relying only on algorithms to infer whether a new feature is liked by the
majority of users or not.

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werewolf
I totally agree with you. I would like to know if they actually have any
reasons why they don't give people this option, because even though people
could tend to opt-out in masses - there still is possibility to motivate them
somehow. About the feedback, it may not be straightforward for the same reason
that people tend to ignore it, so I guess they have it figured out already and
I hope their metrics are set well enough to notice issues.

