Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, has pledged that the social network will not try to control its users’ emotions, as another regulator said it would quiz the company on its psychological experiment.
Ms Sandberg said she regretted that the research – which found that if users saw less positive content in their news feed, they wrote more negative posts and vice versa – was “poorly communicated”.
But she said Facebook could not control people’s emotions and would never try to influence an election through changes on the site.
“Facebook has apologised and certainly never wants to do anything that upsets users. It was communicated very badly,” she said in an interview with NDTV, an Indian network, during a visit to the country.
“It was a one week, small experiment. An experiment showing people different things to see how it works. What really matters here is we take people’s privacy incredibly seriously.”
Ms Sandberg’s comments come after the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, which oversees Facebook’s European operations because they are headquartered in Dublin, said it had sent the company a series of questions about the research.
The UK regulator said on Tuesday that it was investigating whether the company had breached data protection laws, which set boundaries for how data can be collected and used.
The week-long experiment, conducted on fewer than 700,000 Facebook users in 2012, has angered many who worry that the social network is exercising its power in an inappropriate way. While the results showed changes in the news feed had only a marginal impact on emotions, some worried the impact could have been greater.
The research, published earlier this year, was jointly authored by Adam Kramer, who works in Facebook’s core data science team, Jamie Guillory, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in San Francisco, and Jeffrey Hancock, a professor at Cornell University.
Facebook curates what is in the news feed every day, testing the effects of showing different posts to increase the amount of time people spend on the site, how often they come back and how often they engage with advertisements.
Ms Sandberg is visiting India as it has become Facebook’s second-largest market after the US, with 100m users in the country. The company launched its first special ad format for a single country this week, creating a new “missed call” product for advertisers in India.