But the project also raises an ethical conundrum. Once a global social platform wades into social engineering, who decides what desrves such efforts in the future? “I’m not focusing on Facebook in particular,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, remarked at the event. When a site with more than a billion active users can influence what those users do, it means they are “in a position to make choices which we thought were peer-to-peer,” he said. “We absolutely have to think about a framework about how to account for that.”

via Facebook’s Organ Donor and Voting-Drive Efforts Raise The Question — Where Do You Stop? | MIT Technology Review.