Dear John Gapper,
frankly, I don’t understand what all this fuss is about. So Facebook has been manipulating the results users get to see. So what’s new about this? As every avid Facebook user has known for years, and as you yourself are pointing out in today’s „Financial Times“, Facebook is doing this on a daily basis.
This is done based on lots of secret calculations that none of us know. So for just one incident that happened two years ago, part of these calculations have now been made public. I couldn’t care less. If I don’t like what Facebook is doing, I will go somewhere else. Full stop.
By the way, I am not an American citizen. Most of Facebook’s users are not. Therefore, I don’t care about the 1979 consent test for US academic research. It doesn’t apply to me.
Yours sincerely