For now you may think facebook merely facilitates regression. Eventually we'll see them enable repression. The gap is narrow, when one decides to manipulate people by manipulating the news feed they see as well as selling screen space in that "news feed".
Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box.
When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.
It's funny how people who complain about facebook the most are the ones who treat it super seriously. Or why do you allow such stupid feature as "news feed" to be the primary source of your news and then complain about its uselessness?
Facebook is awesome for chatting with friends, organizing events and sometimes even for posting updates about yourself, for those who want to see them. You don't need the news feed for any of that.
Did they arrange it so that you didn't see that post (why would they?), or did you just miss seeing it, or is it just ranked poorly by their algorithm?
Seems like there's a lot of possible explanations, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it's Facebook's fault/
An obituary is not going to get shared widely or get many clicks (unless it's a celebrity), so obviously it will be ranked poorly by Facebook's algorithm. But it is Facebook's choice to rank content based on click rates and virality, so in a way they did arrange it so that post would not be seen.
"Our algorithm did it." does not absolve anyone of their responsibility in choosing to use that algorithm.
The explanation is that that kind of post doesn't provide as much "engagement" (i.e. likes, shares and in the end ad revenue) as the kind of posts that makes facebook a worse place (click-bait kind of articles, "fake news", gif memes etc).
Something like this happened to me too (though it was about a newborn baby). FB simply decided that some of my contacts are not worth showing up in my feed. Some other instead keep popping up, despite me clicking "Hide post - See fewer posts like this" like mad.
Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box.
When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.