Facebook Could have Killed Somone - the Math

In order to confirm a hypothesis, Facebook experimented on people without their knowledge, intentionally making some of their lives more depressing.

The study included 689,003 people (or, if you prefer: users, subjects, customers, lab rats, victims, humans). Among these ~700K users, incidence rates of at-risk behaviors in the United States guarantee some of those who Facebook made sad were having suicidal thoughts, planning to kill themselves, attempting and/or succeeding in doing so. 

While the abstract ethical failure of the study has been discussed well and at length, I want to know concrete numbers. I need statistics. I want the math. Each number is a person and Facebook played dice with their lives. I want to know how close they came to losing while recklessly betting someone else's bank: How many of Facebook's subjects were making plans to kill themselves during the week Facebook intentionally made them more sad? Did any try? Did any succeed?

I needed to figure it out, to know the risk they took and maybe count the dead. This post is the result. It is my admittedly rushed and original research attempting to determine just how stupid this study was. 

The Study

Facebook recently published a Study conducted in January 2012 titled: Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, wherein Facebook manipulated the emotions of 689,003 users without their knowledge. The authors designed the experiment in part to induce the expression of depressed feelings in 155,000 people. They succeeded, confirming the authors' hypothesis.

The methodology of the study does not mention any attempt to exclude at risk users from the study. Given the size of the study, the users on whom Facebook experimented included persons contemplating, planning and attempting suicide.

Facebook wanted to know whether "emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions". To do this, Facebook manipulated the news feeds of 689,003 users without their knowledge. These users became four groups, for the sake of this analysis, I am going to call them 'make happy', 'make happy control', 'make sad' and 'make sad control'. 

Facebook made these users' news feeds either more positive (make happy, 155,000 users, reduced frequency of negative posts), more negative (make sad, 155,000 users, reduced frequency of positive posts) or randomly interfered (both controls, 379,03 users, reduced random posts in proportion to one of the experimental groups).

The Stats 

A few caveats: I am not a professional statistician. I do not have enough time or access to do this properly. Sources are the best I could find in limited time. Personally, I only consider the answers I dug up approximations. Suicide rates vary by country and region and I only had time to do rates for the United States. Please keep in mind you are reading an amateur's blog post. The main reason I go through this step by step is because I would like you to evaluate it, debunk it, improve it, whatever. I really want to know the truth here. When reckless people play with other people's lives we owe it to the victims to at least try to name the dead.

The 'make sad' group of 155,000 users included persons at-risk for suicide. In order to determine how many at-risk users Facebook abused, I use United States suicide rates: an age adjusted suicide rate for the United States in 2011 found through WISQARS as well as estimated rates of adults contemplating, planning and attempting suicide during the past year for 2008-2009 published by the CDC. Since the Facebook study occurred over one week in January 2012 I converted the annual statistics to weekly equivalents:

US Annual Incidence Rates for At Risk Behaviors  Rate/100K % of Adult Pop Suicidal Thoughts 3,700.00 3.7000% Made Suicide Plans 1,000.00 1.0000% Made Suicide Attempt 500.00 0.5000% Suicides 12.32 0.0123% US Weekly Incidence Rates for At Risk Behaviors
	Rate/100K	% of Adult Pop
Suicidal Thoughts	71.15	0.0712%
Made Suicide Plans	19.23	0.0192%
Made Suicide Attempt	9.62	0.0096%
Suicides	0.24	0.0002%

Since I use United States suicide rates, and since Facebook has a global user base, I needed to know roughly how many of the 'make sad' subjects were United States users. The study limited selection of subjects to users who view Facebook in English. I found data breaking down Facebook usage at the time of the study by country (need better source):

Users by Region Q1 2012
US&Can	183,000,000	20.31%
Europe	239,000,000	26.53%
Asia	234,000,000	25.97%
Other	245,000,000	27.19%
Total	901,000,000	100.00%

and by language (need better source):

Users by Language Q1 2012
	English	Total
Q2 2010 (from source)	213,237,080	450,000,000
Q1 2012 (calculated)	315,850,920	874,200,000
Q4 2012 (from source)	359,828,280	1,056,000,000

Based on the ratios of their respective populations, I proportionally reduced the US&Can number to 164,646,768 users in the US. Similarly I used the stats here to adjust for persons in the US who would probably not be viewing Facebook in English. Including persons who either speak English at home or who speak it as a second language 'very well', I calculated 150,307,073 users in the US who viewed Facebook in English at the time of the study. 

Since there were 315,850,920 users viewing Facebook in English worldwide at that time, 47.59% of the randomly selected subjects were likely to be resident in the United States. Again, per the study, the 'make sad' group included 155,000 subjects, so Facebook made about 73,761 Americans sadder than they would otherwise have been. Multiplying this number by the annual and weekly at-risk incidence rates given above yields the following:

	in 2012	in one wk 2012
Americans Made Sadder	73,761	73,761
who had Suicidal Thoughts	2729.17	52.48
who Made Suicide Plans	737.61	14.18
who Attempted Suicide	368.81	7.09
who Killed Themselves	9.09	0.17

The week that Facebook wantonly fucked with the emotions of nearly 75,000 of my countrymen, fifty-two of their victims thought about killing themselves, fourteen made plans to do it and seven non-fatally injured themselves in an attempt to do so. There is a 1 in 6 chance that one of their test subjects died of impossible sadness without knowing they were on an emotional operating table where the surgeons were not trying to save them. Instead they wanted to see what would happen if they tried a little bloodletting on tens of thousands of their patients without checking to see if anyone already had a sucking chest wound.

That is just the week they ran their experiment, January 11-18, 2012. By the end of the year a thousand more had planned or attempted suicide. Nine died.

Conclusion

The numbers above only represent the US portion of their random study. To the best of my figuring it accounts for only half of the people involved.  Additionally I must note that there is no way of knowing the impact the study may have had. The numbers above are based on average rates; I am not saying that Facebook killed anyone. The numbers above are the same for 73,761 people in the US Facebook did not experiment on.

I am saying that the experiment was stupid and reckless. The authors confirm that their work made people sadder. I am saying that many of the people they made sadder were at risk for suicidal thoughts and actions. I am saying that about seven people tried to kill themselves the week that Facebook stole bits of their happiness one post at a time like a patient joy vampire. I am saying that about nine people killed themselves during the year that Facebook hid from them randomly selected rays of hope and sunshine during one cold, dark week in Winter.

Without access to complete data, one cannot conclude that Facebook's study impacted the numbers above. According to the study, the effects were small. I can't say the US average of nine suicides per year for that population became ten because of what they did. Is it possible? I will leave you with the study's authors' thoughts on the subject, on why the effects induced by their actions, though small, still matter:

given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences: For example, the well-documented connection between emotions and physical well-being suggests the importance of these findings for public health. Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors. And after all, an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.

Of the Beginning of All Things - Introduction (2 of 2)

In which I discuss truth that matters before messing with the rest...

This is the third post in this series. Here is the first, my preamble. And the second, the first half of the Introduction. This third post is the latter half of the second. If this were a book we'd still be in the roman numerals, but not for long. Here end the 'but firsts'.

Therefore, the next post in this series will be like chapter 1, and like Trajan I will leave these romans behind and head to arabic lands. So here is the second half of the introduction...

After forty days God sends a wind over the Earth. In fact, this is no wind, but just as Christ returns from the grave, ascends to heaven and sends us his Holy Spirit, so does the Father returning send his Spirit again over the Earth. Ambrose says: "in fact the wind had no power to dry the deluge. Otherwise the sea, which is moved every day by the winds, would become empty. How would the sea become empty by the strength of the winds alone?...There is no doubt therefore, that the deluge was subsided by the invisible power of the Spirit, not through the wind as such but through divine intervention."

On the Beginning of All Things - Introduction (1 of 2)

In which I discuss truth that matters before messing with the rest...

This is the second post in this series. Here is the first, my preamble. 

Before I jump into logically laying out my thoughts about the intersection of reason and revelation in the book of Genesis, and this goes for both you and myself, please remember: whatever actually happened is important, but it is only useful to know if it tells us more about God. The important bits are not how we trace out our genetic inheritance from Adam and Eve, but knowing that the world has been condemned from the first sin, and that sin is our spiritual inheritance. We are condemned by sin to be apart from God.

On the Beginning of All Things - Preamble

In which I get a few things out of the way, so no one is confused by my coming ramblings. 

The two main reasons I started this blog were to share my worship art and to get an awful lot of thinking done about the intersection of science and religion as it applies to the Book of Genesis. There will be other posts about other things, but these are my foci and by committing to writing about them I hope to clear the muddy waters of my thought through the wonder of organizing that wild animal into the bars and lines of electric script. You, my silly reader, if you are there, have been warned: This is not about you. This is for me.

Graphic Memory

Dave Pell owns one fascinating mind. I like the way he thinks. He's nailed it in a great post about the ubiquity of connected cameras and what our ability to record everything is doing to our minds. He got me thinking and I would take it one step further.

Once upon a time we relied on our OEM wetware [brains] to record our vacations, birthday parties, weddings and graduations. Then we turned to cameras, which were great. The financial and technological limits imposed by film and development gave us just the right access to a perfect record of an event. We selected what we captured and waited till we consumed it.

As we waited to get the photos back from the developer, our memories ripened and the glossy 4x6 prints became talismans. Bright kodachrome touchstones traced in white scalloped edging served as hyperlinks. Just like hyperlinks,

Evening and Morning

Day 1 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

God makes the universe, light, H, He, Li (trace), stars, supernovae, heavier elements, more stars, generations of stars forming, condensing, shining, exploding. 

Right after it starts, the universe was a hot, dense plasma of photons, electrons, and protons. It expanded and cooled. Recombination, that is the formation of Hydrogen and Helium from electrons and protons was favored. Dust was made.

Lazarus - Worship Art at Big House Church

Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 48"

This painting is based on my walk with God as He heals and perfects us. It was inspired by a prophetic word and the story of Lazarus.

The base is full white,  representing God's original intent, the plan of creation prior to the fall. It is my soul, my spirit if I had fulfilled God's will, kept His commands and never sinned.

The colors I add are my flaws, hurts, imperfections, failings and my sins. As I go on, when the time is right, God brings healing.