Andrew Ledvina used to be a data scientist at Facebook. He recently made the mistake of talking to a reporter about that, notably telling a WSJ reporter that when he was there from 2012 to 2014, there was no internal review board that might have had qualms about Facebook’s now infamous emotion manipulation study, that he and other data scientists were allowed to run any test they wanted as long as it didn’t annoy users, and that people working there get “desensitized” to the number of people included in their experiments as it’s such a tiny percentage of Facebook’s overall user base. Ledvina, like many a person quoted in the media, didn’t like the way the reporter presented his words and so took to his blog to defend himself, Facebook, and the Facebook study — but I think he simply dug a deeper hole for the company that he quit this April. He facetiously titled the blog, “10 Ways Facebook Is Actually The Devil,” to needle those who see the study as evil, and then went on to confirm the WSJ’s report and shed new light on how Facebook’s data science team views users.
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