<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"ASPEN, Colo. \u2014 During a session on freedom of speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, hosted by the Aspen Institute and\u00A0The Atlantic, Facebook's\u00A0Head of Global Policy Management,\u00A0Monika\u00A0Bickert, was asked about\u00A0the emotion-manipulation study\u00A0that has been a subject of controversy over the past few days.\n\"Do you see some regulation about this,\" an audience member asked, \"and how free speech might be influenced by what users of social networks are shown?\" What if, he continued, governments began asking Facebook to do that kind of manipulation not for science, but for politics \u2014 to affect, essentially, the moods of their citizens by asking the company to influence the content those people are shown?\n\"You point out a policy issue,\"\u00A0Bickert\u00A0replied. And it's one, she said, that gets at \"the tension between legislation and innovation.\"\n\"I'm not really the best expert,\"\u00A0Bickert\u00A0noted by way of caveat, \"and probably our public statements are the best source of information there.\" That said, though: \"I believe that was a week's worth of research done in 2012.\"\nAnd that research, she continued, was done in the name of platform-improvement. As, essentially, customer service. \"Most of the research that is done on Facebook \u2014 if you walk around campus and you listen to the engineers talking \u2014 is all about, 'How do we make this product better? How do we better suit the needs of the population using this product, and how do we show them more of what they want to see, and less of what they don't want to see?'\"\n\"And,\"\u00A0Bickert\u00A0continued, \"that's innovation. That's the reason that when you look at Facebook or YouTube, you're only seeing new features. And that's\u00A0the reason that if you've got that one annoying friend from high school who always posts her photos of her toddler, every day, that's the reason you don't see all of those over the News Feed.\"\nResponding to the regulation question \u2014 the idea that governments could involve themselves in Facebook's influence over people's moods \u2014 Bickert\u00A0emphasized the free-speech implications of that push. \"It's concerning when we see legislation that could possibly stifle that sort of creativity,\" she said. \"At the same time, it's incumbent upon us ... to make sure that we're transparent about what we're doing and that people understand exactly why we're doing it.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/07/02/facebook-emotion-manipulation/>