Early Facebook users protested News Feed as invasive but later embraced it

Evidence

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 Capitalism, 1461

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast with the resist/reflect/recuperate cycle of user resistance that runs throughout this book and the ‘revulsion to reverence’ arc Zuboff documents for other platforms. — connects to: Social media originally appealed through collective joy, now threatened by commercial management — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 633; Facebook’s systematic denial was timed to habituate users before scrutiny could bite. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 498; Public criticism failed to halt Facebook’s behavior modification experiments — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 942 (+1 more)
• ADDENDUM: Complements the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme: moral/political resistance to a new visibility regime gets socially recuperated over time.