I have the privilege of spending the year as a visiting researcher with the social media researchers at Microsoft Research New England. And for the last two weeks or so, its been a particularly stimulating time to be among them. Spurred by the controversial Facebook emotions study and the vigorous debate surrounding it, there’s been a great deal of discussion in the lab and beyond it.

A number of us have also joined the debate publicly, posting here as well as in other places. Rather than re-post each one individually here, I thought I’d collect them into a single post, as they have in many ways emerged from our thinking together.

danah boyd: What does the Facebook experiment teach us?: “What’s at stake is the underlying dynamic of how Facebook runs its business, operates its system, and makes decisions that have nothing to do with how its users want Facebook to operate. It’s not about research. It’s a question of power.”

Kate Crawford: The Test We Can—and Should—Run on Facebook (in The Atlantic): “It is a failure of imagination and methodology to claim that it is necessary to experiment on millions of people without their consent in order to produce good data science.”

Tarleton Gillespie: Facebook’s algorithm — why our assumptions are wrong, and our concerns are right (on Culture Digitally): “But a key issue, both in the research and in the reaction to it, is about Facebook and how it algorithmically curates our social connections, sometimes in the name of research and innovation, but also in the regular provision of Facebook’s service.”

Andrés Monroy-Hernández: A system designer’s take on the Facebook study – a response to danah boyd’s blog post: “…it’s important that we do not throw out the baby out with the bath water. I do not want to see the research community completely avoiding  experimental research in online systems.”

Mary L. Gray: When Science, Customer Service, and Human Subjects Research Collide. Now What? (on Ethnography Matters): “My brothers and sisters in data science, computational social science, and all of us studying and building the Internet of things inside or outside corporate firewalls, to improve a product, explore a scientific question, or both: we are now, officially, doing human subjects research.”

There have also been comments on the issue from other scholars at Microsoft Research, including:

Jaron Lanier, MSR Redmond. Should Facebook Manipulate Users? (The New York Times)

Duncan Watts, MSR New York. Stop complaining about the Facebook study. It’s a golden age for research (The Guardian) and Lessons learned from the Facebook study (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

 Matt Salganik, MSR New York. After the Facebook emotional contagion experiment: A proposal for a positive path forward (Freedom to Tinker)