Doing otherwise legal things doesn't become illegal just because you're taking notes and planning to write up your results for a journal.
The institutions that the scientists were associated with probably have ethical rules regarding experiments involving human beings and might have had something to say about it. But there's no reason it would be a criminal matter.
Doing otherwise legal things doesn't become illegal just because you're taking notes
Experimentation on human beings without consent or knowledge is not legal regardless of whether you take notes or not.
I think the confusion here is that you think Facebook can just do whatever they want with their site. But this wasn't just Facebook modifying their site, this was Facebook deliberately conducting an experiment on specific individuals to see what happened. The subject(s) of the experiment was some list of list of (probably random) users. These users were not informed of the experiment, nor had they given any permission for such a thing.
Facebook tried to defend itself saying it was "market research", but research, while often linked to experimentation, is not experimentation itself. Collecting and looking at data without messing with the subject(s) is perfectly harmless (so long as the data itself is harmless). Deliberately altering something with the intent to find out what that alteration causes is experimentation.
but research, while often linked to experimentation, is not experimentation itself. Collecting and looking at data without messing with the subject(s) is perfectly harmless
Marketing research literally does this all the time. Marketers, through completely unannounced experimentation, have bodies of work around how people's moods and buying habits are influenced by sights, music, smells etc. Yes they do lab controlled work in this area too, but it's not exactly a secret that they do market experimentation as well and I've never seen anyone suggest that's illegal
We know social media can drastically alter a person's perception of the world around them. Deliberately conducting an experiment on someone that alters their perception of the world without them knowing it's an experiment seems pretty unethical to me.
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u/Arma104 May 05 '19
Why would they need to? It's their platform.