Ever since the big kerfuffle over Facebook’s emotion manipulation study — and the defense that this happens all over the Web all the time — we’ve been wondering what other experiments we may have been part of without knowing it. OkCupid came forward Monday with another one: it shot falsehood-tipped arrows through users’ hearts as an experiment. The dating site exhumed its three-year dormant “OkTrends” blog which used to share insights into online daters’ behavior, but went silent after the company was bought by IAC for $50 million. In a flippant entry that announces his upcoming book on data, OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder defends Facebook, brags about experiments OkCupid’s done in the past, and reveals that at some point the site told people who were poor matches for each other that they were perfect pairs, and vice versa. The site wanted to see if OkCupid’s matching algorithm actually predicted whether people would go gaga for each other, or if they were just slaves to an algorithm and would fall in love (or lust) because the data told them they should. In other words, it wanted to know if it had blinded users with data science.
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