Are you a Facebook user? Of late have you been feeling relatively happier or gloomy? If, yes, then chances are that you have been part of a massive experiment recently conducted by Facebook.

Reportedly 70,000 Facebook users have been subjected to a feeling manipulation experiment without their consent. The findings of the experiment were published last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in a paper titled “Experimental Evidence of Massive Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks.”

Facebook, claiming to test a new product like any other consumer company in the world, gave itself the liberty to manipulate the news feeds of the experiment’s subjects, increasing the intensity of good and happy news for some and sad and depressing news for others.

Then the subjects’ behaviors on the platform were monitored to measure if the continuous exposure to happy or sad news is affecting the users in anyway.

The end result: It does. We react to our social network interactions; good reports reflect on us and consequently we share more, we like more and it lifts are moods. Bad news do the opposite, we lose interests in talking to others, get depressed and we might stop using the platform altogether.

Nevertheless, the scale of the experiment, the way it was conducted where human emotions were open for the “researchers” to manipulate and measure, and all that without the knowledge of the subjects opened many ethical and legal questions about the role of social media platforms in our lives.

What we think of as innocent activity of “sharing” and “liking” could be part of larger schemes tailored by these platforms to manipulate our lives, to play with our emotions and to control us in one way or the other.

Such a scenario might suit a movie about a conspiracy theory but the line between what is real and what is imaginary is becoming really blurry.

Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, wrote for the CNN, “Facebook essentially sought to manipulate people’s mood. This is not a trivial undertaking. What if a depressed person became more depressed?”

Such techniques to influence masses is not apparently exclusive to Facebook, it has reportedly found its way to Twitter as well. With all the events that are currently taking place in the region, it has been noticed that some hashtags are created and used in a planned and organized manner to cheer for and support certain causes. Not only that, but certain topics and hashtags are usually turned into a war zone, kidnapped and played by different groups; in a very organized manner that is hard to miss, a race toward winning the highest retweets in a certain hashtag, for example, usually takes place between the competing groups to win the timelines of the targeted audience.

Such phenomena on social media platforms raise many questions: Where are these platforms going? And will they turn into a game in the hands of the platforms’ administrators or even the governments and intelligence agencies to manipulate the public, to monitor them and to control them?

The way the Internet is creeping into our lives is becoming scary … sometimes.