When News Feed was first launched in 2006, it transformed Facebook from a site where users had to visit friends’ pages to see their updates to having those messages automatically shared in a stream on each person’s home page. Hundreds of thousands of users joined opposition groups, repelled by the company’s unilateral invasion of privacy. “No one was prepared for their online activity to suddenly be fodder for mass consumption,” recalled the tech news site TechCrunch on News Feed’s tenth anniversary in 2016, as it offered readers “The Ultimate Guide to the News Feed,” with instructions on “how you can get your content seen by more people,” how to appear “prominently,” and how to resonate with your “audience.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1461