News: You need to know the big issue Facebook is now facing

Facebook may have broken data protection laws when it altered the news feeds of almost 700,000 users back in 2012.

The so-called 'emotion contagion' experiment, in which the social media giant edited feeds to highlight either positive or negative items, has caused outrage among users.

And now the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is said to be investigating whether the site mishandled the private data of those affected.

The experiment's results were revealed in a paper published in the PNAS journal at the weekend.

Facebook has since apologised for the way the paper described the research, and any anxiety that was caused, adding, 'the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this.'