WASHINGTON — Facebook’s chief operating officer says that the psychological experiment that the company performed on 700,000 users was “poorly communicated” — but she didn’t apologize for it.

Sheryl Sandberg spoke about the experiment to the Wall Street Journal blog Digits on Wednesday, and she specifically apologized for the communication, but not the experiment itself.

The 2012 experiment, in which Facebook and two U.S. universities sought to determine whether a stream of negative posts in your news stream could influence you to post more negative updates about your own life.

British regulators are looking into the news.

Sandberg added that “we take privacy and security at Facebook really seriously.”

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