• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 2, 2014

Facebook on Thursday updated its research guidelines, three months after it was revealed that the social network had manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to test whether their moods would be influenced by friends' posts. The news sparked public outrage that prompted the changes Facebook announced today aimed at avoiding similar future episodes. 

Specifically, Facebook has introduced a series of measures designed to ensure more oversight and broader review of research projects. These include giving researchers more extensive guidelines that require work focused on particular groups (such as people of a certain age), or on content that might be considered deeply personal, like emotions, to go through an enhanced review process.

“The guidelines also require further review if the work involves a collaboration with someone in the academic community,” stated CTO Mike Schroepfer, in a blog post today outlining the policy changes.

To that end, Facebook created a review panel including its “most senior subject-area researchers,” along with staff from engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams, to review projects falling within those guidelines. This would be in addition to its existing cross-functional privacy review process for products and research.

Furthermore, Facebook has added education on research practices to its six-week training program for new engineers, as well as a section on research in the annual privacy and security training required of all company employees. To promote more openness, Facebook will also post published academic research at a new Web site, to be updated regularly.

Facebook has previously apologized for the 2012 study in which it deliberately filtered out some positive or negative posts. Researchers concluded that mood was “contagious,” based on users’ responses matching the tone of the posts they saw.

“Although this subject matter was important to research, we were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism. It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently,” wrote Schroepfer.

That includes finding “non-experimental” ways to do the research, having more extensive review by a wider group of senior people, and communicating why and how the study was done. Schroepfer also explained Facebook does research in a wide range of fields with the goal of improving the company’s products and services.

A pair of law professors from the University of Maryland last month sent a letter to the Maryland Attorney General arguing that Facebook’s psychological experiment (and a separate test conducted by dating site OKCupid) violated state law because researchers failed to obtain users’ informed content before running them.

The changes Facebook announced Thursday did not touch on the issue of user consent.