When the "Teenage Giants" Facebook and Google Manipulate Us

What an exciting scientific experiment and what a storm of indignation: Media researchers Jeff Hancock and Jamie Guillory from Cornell University's Social Media Lab, together with Facebook employee Adam D.I. Kramer, manipulated the feeds of 700,000 unsuspecting users. One portion of the Facebook users received a week's worth of mostly positive news from their "circle of friends," while the other portion was confronted with a selection of bad news. As expected, the researchers found that the presumed "emotional contagion effect " worked both ways - for those users who were bombarded with negative news, this depressed their mood and was reflected in correspondingly negative statements of their own. "If, on the other hand, the negative news was reduced, the opposite picture emerged: people also expressed themselves positively in their own status updates," Hancock reported.

The project turned out to be a time bomb that only burst after two years at the beginning of July 2014, when the researchers announced their findings and inflicted serious reputational damage on Facebook. The media around the world were outraged that "users were being milked as data donors," as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung put it. And quite rightly, the paper went on to gripe: "Facebook thus showed once again what the term 'user' or 'users' actually means: they are being used." On the other hand, how naive are we that something like this still outrages us? After all, we've known for a long time that both search engines like Google and operators of social networks like Facebook manipulate their algorithms at whim. Zurich media researcher Natascha Just calls the Silicon Valley giants "teenage giants" - probably also to emphasize that one can hardly expect a highly developed sense of social responsibility from adolescents, regardless of whether they are just individuals or youthful companies that have grown so rapidly thanks to their immeasurable success that they have hardly had a chance to steer this growth process into halfway "orderly" channels.

For a long time, far too long, digital natives and older, net-savvy contemporaries have believed that companies like Facebook and Google could actually take the Google founders' motto "Don't be evil" seriously and make it the guiding principle of their actions - until Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt himself made it clear, with refreshing openness, that he considers this motto to be gross nonsense. In any case, the last few years have shown time and again that Google, Facebook, Amazon & Co. behave like monopolists wherever they have a monopoly - namely in a shirt-sleeved and self-interested manner, as described in any sensible introduction to economics.

Just as naively, many of us have assumed that Google and Facebook "only" manipulate their algorithms to improve their balance sheets, but not to steer public communication in one direction or another. The experiment of the Cornell scientists now impressively proves that the control of the data flow can also serve completely different purposes - and without anyone finding out about it, unless the company or the university involved voluntarily disclosed it or there was a whistleblower like Edward Snowden in their own ranks.

However, improving the balance sheet should also have its limits. Just as Google pays for search results to be reported at the top, Facebook has been asking its institutional users to pay for some time now if they want to achieve more reach. At least for non-profit organizations that have little cash but previously invested time and energy in their Facebook accounts in the confidence that they could expand their own network, this was another resounding slap in the face.

In the old media world, the media industry's fat advertising revenues financed a public communication space in which there were professional journalists as gatekeepers who made sure that advertisers did not dominate this space. With Facebook and Google and their methods of profit maximization, we are well on the way to stifling this public discourse space - and we are all watching rather inactively so far. All it would really take is a little effort (switching to other search engines and social networks, encrypted e-mail communication, a little more willingness to pay for "independent" journalism) to take a little wind out of the sails of the "teenage giants," to complicate their hitherto carefree lives a little and thus better prepare them for adult life in our free societies - mind you, in societies in which "market" and "democracy" are not just empty words and the "newspeak" of spin doctors, but continue to function at least halfway because regulatory policy, but also the citizens themselves, succeed time and again in defending the freedom principle of the market and the equality principle of democracy against the power claims of monopolists and autocrats.

Stephan Russ-Mohl heads the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano.