#002 The Facebook Contagion Study

This episode tells the story of Facebook’s 2012 emotional contagion experiment, when the platform quietly manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 users to see whether emotions could be influenced at scale. From there, it traces the larger pattern that followed, including the data harvesting scandal involving Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s transformation into Meta. What begins as a single controversial study opens into something much bigger: a business model built on attention, behavioral prediction, and constant experimentation. This is not just a story about one research paper. It is about how the platforms that connect us also shape us, often without our knowledge, and why the experiment never really stopped.