but proliferates, spilling out to provoke other users and appear in other online environments. 22 1 2 46. Facebook knew that it could increase engagement and the length of time users 3 spend on its websites (and subsequently increase its revenue) by adjusting its algorithms to 4 manipulate users’ News Feeds and showing them more negative content thus causing “massive- 5 scale emotional contagion.” In 2014, Adam Kramer, a member of Facebook’s “Core Data 6 Science Team,” co-authored an article describing one of the experiments that Facebook 7 conducted on its own users, stating, 8 we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed … Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging. One such test is reported in this study: A test of whether posts with emotional content are more engaging. 9 10 11 12 13 *** 14 The results show emotional contagion…. [F]or people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive ... 15 16 These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.23 17 18 19 47. Independent research unequivocally confirms that fake content thrives on 20 Facebook over more reliable and trustworthy sources. In September 2021, the Washington Post 21 reported on a “forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the 22 Université Grenoble Alpes in France [which] found that from August 2020 to January 2021, 23 news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, 24 25 26 27 28 22 Luke Munn, Angry by design: toxic communication and technical architectures, HUMANIT SOC SCI COMMUN 7 (July 30, 2020), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-02000550-7. 23 Adam D.I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, 111 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES, no. 29 (June 17, 2014), https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1320040111. CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT 16 Case No. __________________