The experimental results left no doubt that once again Facebook’s carefully designed, undetectable, and uncontestable subliminal cues reached beyond the screen into the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of naive users, predictably actuating specific qualities of emotional expression through processes that operate outside the awareness of their human targets, just as Stuart MacKay had originally prescribed for Galapagos turtles and Canadian elk (see Chapter 7). … Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors. … The team celebrated its work as "some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network," and they reflected on the fact that even their relatively minimal manipulation had a measurable effect, albeit a small one.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 944