This week, the "study hit the fan" for Facebook, as the world of online media picked up on the controversial Facebook emotion research that we reported early last Saturday and a privacy group filed a formal complaint with the FTC. Meanwhile, Twitter could introduce an integrated "Buy Now" button, Vine added "Loop Counts" and YouTube was found to be more popular than television.

It's time for Social Media Saturday!

Facebook's Creepy Study Followed by Uproar, FTC Complaint

Last week, we devoted most of Social Media Saturday to Facebook's secret emotion study -- which was, at the time, an obscure scientific study that had only been reported by the Onion's A.V. Club and a few others. Boy, did the media pick up on that lead quickly!

The week since, hundreds of news stories and opinion pieces have been written on the study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which researchers with Facebook secretly manipulated the news feeds of over half a million users in 2012 in order to see what effect certain variables had on their shared emotions.

Now, according to The New York Times' Bits Blog, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (or EPIC, a leading U.S. privacy advocacy group) is formally filing a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission over the world's largest social media company treating some of its users like lab rats.

"The complaint concerns Facebook's secretive and non-consensual use of personal information to conduct an ongoing psychological experiment on 700,000 Facebook users," EPIC wrote in its formal complaint, "i.e., the company purposefully messed with people's minds."

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