It's a truism that where there's smoke there's fire, so if we know that in the past Facebook has played with our settings and breached our privacy, a workable rule of thumb is that they're always up to something. That seems to be the basic reasoning behind the beginning of the Rainbow rumor. Snopes identifies an article in The Atlantic as the start of this particular experiment rumor. That article examines the value of studying how influence spreads in social networks and sees the Rainbow profile change as an interesting example. It seems that the closest it comes to actually identifying the profile change as a Facebook-run experiment is a quote form an MIT researcher:
“This is probably a Facebook experiment!” joked the MIT network scientist Cesar Hidalgo on Facebook yesterday. “This is one Facebook study I want to be included in!” wrote Stacy Blasiola, a communications Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois, when she changed her profile.And from there things can easily snowball. One day after the posting of the Atlantic article BoingBoing picked up on it, and suddenly the joking had evolved, and had fallen in line with our expectations. In a very short piece that linked to the Atlantic article and quoted a small part of it that noted that profile picture changes are "tracked and analyzed" we were also given permission to let our suspicions out of the bag:
When Facebook offered a "rainbow filter" for images, following last week's landmark Supreme Court decision in favor of gay marriage, people joked that it was probably another creepy social experiment. Well, probably, yes.The correct answer was actually "probably no", but that's considerably less appealing. Have I already noted that everybody loves a good conspiracy theory? The Gospel Herald certainly does, and it chimed in with the headline:
Millions of Facebook Users Who Changed Their Profile Pictures to Rainbow Did Not Know They Were Part Of Behavioral ExperimentA Google search on Facebook, "rainbow profile" and experiment brings up over 10,000 hits. Certainly not all of these continued to spread the rumor, but a good many of them did.