Yes, I am the highly suggestible type

I am not your guinea pig, Facebook. I am a human being with a soul and a heart and a mind and hopes and fears and wishes and selfies. You have no right to toy with my emotions.

I feel profoundly violated by the news that in the name of some unholy research, Facebook once toyed with my friends’ posts just to manipulate my emotions. The heartless company messed around with my news feed to promote more negative items on my news feed. This was all in for some inhumane study focusing on how suggestive social networking posts would be in influencing our emotional states.

This unmitigated catastrophe took place in January 2012. I vividly remember that month and the crushing depression it brought. If you read my posts from that month, you can get a window into the 4 a.m. bleakness of the human soul. Every morning, I would wake up in a fine mood. Then I would check Facebook and begin my downward spiral. A friend posted an update about a faulty oven that burned her casserole and I remember wanting to stick my own head in the oven. Someone showed a photo of a snowy street and I started hunting online for black market Paxil to close the gaping void inside me. Once that black month passed, the sinister experiment ended and I felt better. But nothing can erase my scars.

You can’t really put a value on my pain and suffering as a website raked its cruel claws across the very fabric of my being. But since I’m filing a lawsuit against Facebook, I have been forced to state that value at $3.75 million. An apology is not enough.

Nothing but social media posts could be that suggestive and put my entire sense of well-being in jeopardy like that. I was close to losing my identity as a person. On one level, I should be happy because the revelation of the nefarious plot means that I am not mentally ill and merely a victim of Facebook’s capricious whims. Mostly I am horrified by the cruelty of this Mengele-rific experiment and the breach of privacy, which is worse than the NSA could have ever dreamed.

Yes, I know I sound hysterical right now. But is that really me talking? Or did Mark Zuckerberg and his evil scientists manipulate my feed again to make me this way? How deep does this rabbit hole go?!