Research Paper on Manipulative Advertising

In today’s society, hanging out on social media has become one of the most popular pastimes. So popular, in fact, that companies have decided to use this and advertise their products online. However, many have taken it upon themselves to manipulate their advertisements in an attempt to increase sales. Facebook, on the other hand, has taken a different approach to manipulative advertising.  They changed nearly 700,000 users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their emotions. Manipulative advertising is wrong, but what made this so much worse is that they did it without informed consent. Manipulative advertising can mislead people, cause feelings of distrust, and ultimately is beyond ethical guidelines. Thus, Facebook was wrong to manipulate users by changing the advertisements and feeds shown to certain people on their website.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that the definition of ‘manipulate’ is “to control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.” When someone is influenced, their actions change from what they were going to be to something else. For example, when Facebook manipulated it’s users, it influenced them to post different things and have different reactions. Some Facebook supporters argue that they only prevented certain posts and advertisements from being seen, and didn’t actually change anything, therefore not manipulating anyone. However, Wroblewski of Chron disagrees and states that manipulation is a, “...type of social influence that aims to change the perception or behavior of others through underhanded, deceptive or abusive tactics...” (par. 2). Wroblewski uses this definition to explain Facebook’s actions. She argues that Facebook’s intent was to see if they could change the behavior of their users, and they did that through deceiving them by controlling their feed. Another paper, while written in 2009, helps to support this. Jon D. Hanson and Douglas A. Kysar talk about how people can be easily manipulated. They go further to explain that Facebook isn’t the only one out there deceiving people, as it has been happening for years in the cigarette industry, having lasting effects. Some effects, for example, are The Real Cost commercials, and new regulations on advertising harmful substances. No matter the effects, the intent is still the same. Facebook tried to manipulate it’s users and in the process, they misled nearly 700,000 people.

Much like the cigarette commercials, Facebook, too, has had effects on its users, causing a stir in the public and new feelings of distrust. As explained previously, there are many different arguments on the case. Hill describes in her article how people felt “disturbed” and that one professor even tweeted, “*Probably* nobody was driven to suicide...” (par. 3). However, that’s not the end of the criticism. Birkett stated that, “The publication of these results, of course, led to massive blowback...” (par. 7). People were largely upset with two things. One being that their emotions were played with, and the second being that it was done without the informed consent required for this type of research. Arthur from The Guardian explains how “the researcher is responsible for making sure all participants are properly consented…” (par. 9). The only form of consent that Facebook had was a little box for the terms and conditions. Max Masnick, a researcher with a doctorate in epidemiology, even says that “as a researcher, you don’t get an ethical free pass because a user checked a box next to a link to a website’s terms of use...” (Arthur par. 9). In human research studies, proper consent involves verbally explaining the consent form and sometimes even quizzing the participants. This is to ensure that they are aware of what they are going to be involved in. However, because Facebook has deemed the terms and conditions box a viable replacement for this, many people are unsure of what they will do next with their “consent”.

The main problem still remains, and is that Facebook is manipulating users through online media where “ethics aren’t discussed as frequently” (Birkett par. 3). Masnick believes that based on the information from a PNAS paper, Facebook’s actions went beyond ethical guidelines when considering the lack of informed consent. However, the bigger question is, what are these ethical guidelines? Roger Dooley helps to define them with his response to manipulation. He says that “If you are being honest, and if you are helping the customer get to a better place, it’s not manipulation and it’s not unethical” (Birkett par. 185). Many people believe that Facebook was not honest, once again, referring back to the lack of informed consent. People also believe that there was no real need for or benefit of the research. Even Adam Kramer, one of the researchers, stated that “ In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety” (Arthur par. 11). This goes to show how Facebook overstepped their ethical boundary. However, we can go even further and use moral values to discuss exactly what views consider their actions to be wrong. 

Different moral values may look at the Facebook scandal differently. Kant’s view, which tells us that “we should act only according to those actions that could be universally accepted and acted on” would say that Facebook’s actions were unethical. They did not have proper informed consent and if all human research programs did the same, possibly harmful experiments could happen to unaware subjects. In addition to this, one could say that Facebook used it’s users for their own benefit, agreeing with Kant’s perspective on this as well. On the other hand, utilitarianism would justify Facebook’s actions. It states that “an act is right if it maximizes overall happiness.” Because Facebook argued that their research was for the benefit of the users, no matter the consequences, utilitarianism supports it. Another key idea to point out is that Facebook’s actions took away the user’s autonomy, or ability to make reasoned and voluntary choices. This is because their feelings were manipulated and they ended up acting in ways that they normally wouldn’t. A different look at this case can be seen through Ross’s prima facie moral duties. However, due to the matter of relevance, we will only look at four of them. The first being the duty of beneficence, which, much like utilitarianism, focuses on helping others and overall happiness. This would support Facebook's actions because, as stated before, they were just trying to help improve the user’s experience. The duty of self-improvement would agree with this as well. Next, the duty of justice talks about fairness. Was it fair to the users to be deceived? Many wouldn’t think so. Finally, the duty of non-maleficence focuses on doing no harm. However, as previously mentioned, the Facebook scandal did more harm than good. In total, apart from certain views resting on ideas such as utilitarianism, Facebook's actions can be seen as unethical. (DesJardins).

So far, we have looked at how manipulative advertising can mislead people, cause feelings of distrust, and be beyond ethical guidelines. We also discussed how different moral values judge Facebook’s actions differently and how in the end, the majority see them as unethical. One thing we have yet to think about is what should have been done to avoid this? Hill gives us her solution. She says, “Ideally, Facebook would have a consent process for willing study participants: a box to check somewhere saying you're okay with being subjected to the occasional random psychological experiment that Facebook's data team cooks up in the name of science…” (par. 8). While not the most proper way to say it, this would, in fact, be the ideal solution. Most people were disturbed because they were unaware that they were part of the experiment. If Facebook made the consent box a little clearer, maybe separate from their terms and conditions, people would have no argument towards Facebook to say that they weren’t informed. In the end, I feel like Dooley’s words help to explain the situation quite well. He says “In today’s age of enforced transparency for business, manipulative tactics that deceive the customer simply won’t work. They will be quickly exposed and, with consumer voices amplified by social media, cause far more damage to the business than any short-term benefit...” (Birkett par. 187). This is exactly the case with Facebook. Their experiment was exposed and received a backlash from their users, causing more harm than good. Now, Facebook knows that they were wrong to manipulate their users, however, they have yet to fix the problem.