Facebook has been messing with you on purpose

What’s your morning routine like? You probably wake up, brush your teeth, take a dump, shower, change and head down for a cup of your favourite wake-me-up drink while you catch up on your social media feed — Facebook, for instance.

Unless you’re me, then that all changes depending on how many times I hit the snooze button.

Facebook could probably be your favourite social media platform. Heck, you’re probably reading this article because it popped up on your Facebook feed. Now, what if I told you that your favourite social media platform was secretly experimenting on you?

According to a report by The Verge, it appears that Facebook had secretly experimented on its Android mobile users, crashing their apps intentionally, “selectively disconnecting” them from their Facebook applications for hours on end.

Why? Well, apparently it was done to prepare for the possibility of Google removing the Facebook application from their Play Store for competitive reasons. They wanted to prepare for a future where users might have to resort to downloading the Facebook application from a source outside of the Google Play Store.

Despite the fact that Facebook is one of the Play Store’s biggest application developers, there is a looming threat that the social network could bypass Google’s services altogether.

The tests were allegedly conducted to see how far they could go to get Android users to abandon their platform altogether. The results? “People never stopped coming back.”

According to a person familiar with the tests, those who were locked out of their application defaulted to the mobile web browser version of Facebook, rather than abandoning the application. Are you surprised?

We weren’t. Right now, there is simply no alternative to Facebook and what the social media platform offers, so it seems only natural that users would find any means possible to access the site. The only problem this presents is that like all tyrants, once people give Facebook this “absolute power”, the social media giant can afford to push more boundaries than otherwise ethically possible because they know you will always come back.

The only problem this presents is that like all tyrants, once people give Facebook this “absolute power”, the social media giant can afford to push more boundaries than otherwise ethically possible because they know you will always come back.

Although this was supposedly a one-time experiment conducted years ago, this isn’t the first social experiment Facebook undertook. Yes, we’re talking about the controversy in 2014 where Facebook altered the content on users’ News Feeds to see if it would change their moods.

Information surfaced last year that Facebook bombarded several users’ News Feeds with sad and depressing content to see if they were less likely to visit the site if it made them sad. The experiment was so controversial that even the editor behind the study was “creeped out“, questioning if the results of the study were actually worth all the backlash.

What most people don’t realise — or choose to turn a blind eye on — is that social experimenting on the Internet is nothing new. Pretty much every website has done it to some extent. The question then becomes whether you know you’re being experimented on or not.

Perhaps what makes what Facebook did so painful was that it felt personal on some level because these were people’s personal feeds. Privacy settings exist for a reason right?

What do you guys think of anonymous social experiments conducted by your favourite websites? Let us know in the comments below.

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