Upstart (Palo Alto, Calif., July 23) -- When Karrie Karahalios, a professor in computer science at Illinois, and her colleagues went to test how Facebook chooses what to display on its newsfeed, the majority of their 40 study participants had no idea that Facebook was even making choices about what they saw or didn't see in their newsfeed.
Related story: The Washington Post (July 28) -- It turns out that online dating site OkCupid has been performing some of the same psychological experiments on its users that landed Facebook in hot water recently. As many as 62.5 percent of Facebook users don’t know the news feed is generated by a company algorithm, according to a recent study conducted by Karrie Karahalios, an Illinois professor of computer science, along with a professor from the University of Michigan.