Michelle Meyer (pictured) has a very detailed post on this subject over at The Faculty Lounge. Her approach is different from Nancy’s, focusing narrowly (but thoroughly) on the question of whether an Institutional Review Board (IRB) could have approved the FB experiment. There Meyer arrives at a different conclusion than I think Nancy would arrive at. Meyer thinks an IRB could have and should have approved the FB experiment based on informed consent (although she recognizes that one could dispute whether such consent was actually present), and Nancy, I think correctly, questions whether there are very strong arguments that FB users knowingly agreed to this kind of experiment when they agreed to FB’s terms.
