While Facebook’s recent research on unwitting customers wasn’t as upsetting as, say, the Stanford Prison Experiment, it rightly brought about an avalanche of criticism. But what does this mean for social scientists who wish to conduct experiments from the Internet’s wealth of data rather than lab-based trials, studies which won’t produce profits but knowledge, which could bring to light hidden prejudices? From the Economist:

“When it emerged in June that Facebook had secretly manipulated the emotional tenor of what a small fraction of users saw, outrage ensued. Even though this kind of experimentation is within the bounds laid out by tick-box user agreements, many column inches were devoted to the ethical considerations of subjecting users to such fiddling.

Online, many people simply typed ‘derp.’ The word is used as a postscript to a stupid action or statement; it is probably a bastardisation, of the kind that the internet tends to produce, of ‘duh.’ A new academic initiative aims to reclaim the word, at the same time putting social-media research on a more ethical footing: DERP, the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership.

The effort brings together 18 academic fellows and five social-media partners: Imgur, an image and video repository; Reddit and Fark, two community-driven news and discussion sites; StackExchange, a collection of question-and-answer sites; and video-sharing service Twitch (recently acquired by Amazon for $970m).

Collaborations of this sort are not new; Facebook’s folly was just particularly publicised. Some of the most innovative digital research to date has studied the simple process of Reddit users asking for a gift of pizza. Research by Tim Althoff of Stanford University, in California, and colleagues analysed the sentiments involved in 22,000 posts on Reddit’s ‘Random Acts of Pizza’ (its tagline: ‘Restoring faith in humanity, one slice at a time’).

Their paper ‘How to ask for a Favor,’ shows that pizza-pie philanthropy was correlated to how early in the month the request was made, and how needy an asker appeared to be (rather than merely how desirous). As mundane as these results might seem, they represent the vanguard of social-network science. This analysis of thousands of real people interacting in a real situation—as opposed to a few dozen underpaid undergraduates in a trumped-up psychology-lab scenario—showed that, contrary to psychologists’ expectations, Reddit users rewarded neither requests that sounded upbeat nor those from people who seemed similar to themselves.”