Isn't this just what every media company has done since the beginning of time? You think the news companies don't select their stories based on the same concept? And I'm pretty sure you would get approval to do something similar to animals given that you can get approval to actually feed them drugs and see how that affects their behavior.

Can you provide evidence that [non-social] media companies have performed research specifically to see if they can make people sadder, similar to what was described above?

Turn on cable news for a minute and it's quite obvious that it is designed to make you angry. What difference does it make if they performed research or not?

Because it's the whole topic of this conversation

> "From history we know that research left unchecked and unrestricted can start leading to some really dark and horrible things. Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like on the entire population."

For example maybe next they decide to research whether they can influence body dysmorphia, or suicide

I can speak to the types of experiments done, and media companies never had the same degree of ability, data or talent.

Even something benign and commonplace like A/B testing, was not possible given a physical newspaper.