so that the feed most users believed to represent every update from every friend in a real-time stream, in fact, became an edited one, much like “top news.” What caused the most controversy was the fact that this change in default occurred without Facebook notifying its users about it. The option to change the default was tucked away at the botom of a drop down menu, barely noticeable. Users who did notice, however, quickly started to warn other users, pointing to the fact that these changes basically meant that people were not seeing everything that they should be seeing (Hull, 2011).
The revelation that the “most recent” feed was filtered is just one of many controversies surrounding the features and functionalities of the Facebook platform that the company has faced throughout the years. Besides representing yet another case of shaky privacy setings, it clearly points toward a certain disconnect between user expectations and reality. As we will discuss in much more detail in the next chapter, user expectations and perceptions about how technology works or ought to work may afect their media practices just as much as the actual working of that technology. As with the example above of users geting a sense of not seeing everything they should be seeing, the aforementioned revelations about the Facebook emotion experiment continue to show how important it is to hold software companies such as Facebook accountable. In late June 2014, the news broke that Facebook had “tinkered” with users’ emotions by manipulating the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users, changing the number of positive and negative posts they saw (Goel, 2014). Facebook researchers had published the findings from the experiment in an academic paper. The experiment itself had been carried out for one week in January 2012, one and a half years prior to the public outcry engendered through the mass media. Notwithstanding the apparently small efects obtained, the experiment unleashed a huge controversy about algorithms, human subject research, and regulation (Meyer, 2014). What was most surprising about the media frenzy following the academic publication was not so much the actual experiments described in the article but the widespread public surprise in the face of this news. Like the public perception of what a “most recent” feed ought to be, the Facebook emotion experiment revealed that there are many persistent beliefs about how technology works and should work. As Gillespie (2014) put it in a blog post:
There certainly are many, many Facebook users who still don’t know they’re receiving a curated subset of their friends’ posts, despite the fact that this has been true, and “known,” for some time. But it’s more than that. Many users know that they get some subset of their friends’ posts, but don’t understand the criteria at work. Many know, but do not think about it much as they use Facebook in any particular moment. Many know, and think they understand the criteria, but are mistaken. Just because we live with Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t mean we fully understand it.
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