Facebook has revealed it’s secret experiments on users’ news feeds failed to change their emotions and most people remained smug when reading about a their friends’ misfortunes.
The experiment was designed to see if users seeing negative posts from people on their friends list made them feel more negative themselves, however the opposite seems to be true.
“Seeing my friends post about their boring lives or family arguments always make me feel better about my own life,” one user told us.
“Sometimes it’s like watching an internet version of Jeremy Kyle right their on my phone or PC. You can’t help but feel better about yourself as you scroll through other people’s misery.”
“And a picture of their McDonald’s dinner with the hashtag #nomnom somehow makes my steak taste better.”
They also found that no matter how much they flooded timelines with posts that say what decade you are, what dinosaur you are, or what Cluedo murder you are most likely to commit, most people failed to have any emotional connection to them and generally ‘didn’t give a shit’.
“What we found is people who reply to the depressingly vague ‘why me 🙁 ‘posts with ‘what’s up babe’ ‘I’m here if you want to talk’ and ‘PM me’ aren’t concerned but just fancy a bit of a gossip,” Mark Zuckerberg explained.
“In fact the only time people felt a negative emotional reaction to a post it was quite a dramatic one with severe threats of violence increasing ten-fold when a user gets another bloody request to play Candy Crush Saga.”
