Facebook allegedly broke its own app just to see what people would do

(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GettyImages)

published 5 January 2016

In its latest user experiment, Facebook allegedly crashed its own app for Android users with the purpose of seeing how long it would take users to give up on using the social media site. The findings, intended to help Facebook develop a contingency plan should its relationship with Android operator Google ever go sour, were reportedly surprising: According to tech journal The Information, "the company wasn't able to reach the threshold" of when people would give up, because "people never stopped coming back." Even if the app was down for hours, The Guardian reports that users simply switched over from the app to the mobile version of the site.

Though this test reportedly happened just once "several years ago," The Guardian reports that the social network is catching flak for once again going too far in its user testing. As The Verge's Casey Newton explains, the real problem is that "users are almost totally unaware of these experiments." "And if they do eventually find out about them, they can't really leave — because there's simply no other meaningful Facebook-like service in the market," Newton writes. "That gives the company a moral imperative to treat its users honestly."

This isn't the first time Facebook experimented on its users, either. Back in 2014, Facebook found itself in hot water after it was revealed that it had experimented on users to study "emotional contagion" by purposefully putting more positive or negative content on news feeds to see if it affected what users then posted.