This story was updated on July 3, 4:11 p.m. to include Cornell's response to this article.
New statements from the U.S. military related to Facebook's controversial emotion-manipulation study have further muddied the origin of the News Feed experiment some have called "creepy."
On Wednesday, an Army spokesperson told Mashable that someone at Cornell University sent a proposal in 2008 to the U.S. military for funding. Though the Army never funded it, the spokesperson said, that proposal was for the same Facebook emotion-manipulation study of 2012 that has caused so much drama for the social network in 2014. On Thursday, a Cornell spokesman contradicted the Army's version of events, saying the university never applied for a military grant for this study.
Cornell, which employs one of the study's researchers and used to employ another, has quickly distanced itself from rumors that the Department of Defense funded the study.
In its June 10 press release publicizing the study, Cornell initially noted that it had received funding from the Army Research Office. But a month later, as controversy over the study began to mount, the Cornell Chronicle amended the press release to say the study had not received any external funding. Now, an Army spokesperson tells us his organization has seen the proposal before -- but Cornell's not talking. (Despite repeated requests for comment, Cornell originally did not respond.)
In the study, a look into "emotional contagion" on social networks, Facebook altered the News Feeds of almost 700,000 people to see if positive and negative status updates would affect their emotions. News of the tampering angered people over the weekend, with legal experts calling the ethics of the experiment into question.
Then some news reports noted on Wednesday that one of the authors of the study, Cornell's Jeffrey Hancock, had received money from the Department of Defense in 2009 for another paper titled "Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes," and that other Cornell researchers had also received funding for a study titled "Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions."
Both of those research efforts were funded by the Minerva Initiative, a Pentagon project to fund social science on strategic issues.
But as we found out, that's not the only connection between Facebook's recent study and the military. There's that 2008 proposal the Army told Mashable about. Cornell apparently sent it to the Army Research Office, the same institution named in Cornell's initial press release, for this very same study, according to Army spokesperson Wayne Hall.
"It was the same proposal," Hall told Mashable on Wednesday, adding that he wasn't aware of the specifics of the proposal, but that "it was titled the same."
The study's authors, Hancock and Jamie Guillory, as well as a Facebook spokesperson, did not answer Mashable's requests for comment either.
Hall confirmed that the Army never funded the study and he also said the Army never asked Cornell to issue the correction on the press release. So it's unclear why Cornell included the information in the first place, and why it didn't correct the mistake for almost 20 days.
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, called that suspicious.
"Why do I call this strange? Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work," Rosen wrote in a Facebook post. "So now we have to believe that [...] Jeffrey Hancock wasn’t shown or didn’t read the press release in which he is quoted about the study’s results (weird) or he did read it but somehow failed to notice that it said his study was funded by the Army when it actually wasn’t (weirder)."
So, while it appears that this particular study never received a dime from the Pentagon, Cornell's refusal to come clean and answer questions only fosters more suspicion, despite the fact that there may be nothing more nefarious here than a public relations debacle.
"I think this is conspiracy-theory mongering without having an understanding of how research and DoD research funding works," Allan Friedman, a scholar at George Washington University who is familiar with the military's research into social networks, told Mashable.
Friedman explained that the Army Research Laboratory, the parent organization of the Army Research Office, "funds a huge amount of research" and that most of these studies overstate their practical impact.
"In reality," he said, "most of this stuff is just science."