Screwing with your emotions is Facebook's entire business

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[Commentary] By now you've probably heard about the controversial Facebook study in which the company altered the news feeds of some 698,003 users for a week in 2012 to determine if seeing more happy or sad posts affected the emotional content those users posted next. There's been an enormous backlash: the study itself seems particularly dumb, there's a chance Facebook acted unethically or illegally by not disclosing the study to users, the researchers involved are apologizing, and in general it seems like Facebook did something really, really bad.

But here's the thing: manipulating the News Feed is Facebook's entire business. Where Google makes advertisers bid against each other to display ads that appear when you search for certain keywords. Facebook does something a fair bit simpler: it just doesn't show users everything in their News Feeds.

Of the 1500 potential items your friends will share on Facebook in a given day, you'll likely only see 300 of them -- and if an advertiser or marketer or news organization wants to get more eyeballs from Facebook, they can pay to make sure their stuff shows up in your News Feed, carefully targeted to keywords and demographics. Compare that to Twitter, which firehoses everything your friends share at you in real time.

It's better for news junkies, but Facebook can make promises about how many and what sort of people will see something that Twitter can only dream about. There's so much value in showing you things from your friends on Facebook that it's the revenue model for an entire class of viral media startups. Taco Bell pays BuzzFeed to create shareable advertising, and then pays Facebook to tweak the News Feed to make sure that advertising shows up when it's shared.


Screwing with your emotions is Facebook's entire business