Is Facebook’s “Celebrate Pride” tool a lame psychological experiment?
We might never learn, but it’s not like this is would be the first time Facebook did something like this. Only a couple of months ago Facebook actually published a study in which it analyzed the factors that predicted support for marriage equality on Facebook. Basically, the researchers looked at what prompted a user to change his or her profile photo to the red equals sign. The implications were much broader, though: it offered a great starting material to see how users rally on facebook and collective activity permeates the social network. That’s pretty powerful information. Just replace marriage equality with social unrest or political sympathy.
An important finding from the study was that users with more friends were more likely to change their profile pic to the equals sign. It wasn’t clear though whether this change of the profile pic was prompted by the exposure to more similar posts, given...