Playing to the fear of invisibility and abandonment worked in 2006, when Facebook had just 9.5 million users (and required a college e-mail address to sign up), and it has driven the acceptance of every subsequent tweak to News Feed as Facebook has amassed more than 2 billion users. News Feed grew to become the “epicenter” of the corporation’s revenue success and “the most valuable billboard on Earth,” as Time magazine stated in 2015, just three years after Facebook’s IPO.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1462