Chapter 24: Further Reading

Facebook's News Feed: A Decade of Optimization Against Users

The sources below are organized thematically. Each entry includes a brief annotation explaining its relevance, its central argument or contribution, and its appropriate level of difficulty for undergraduate study.

Primary Documents and Journalism

1. Haugen, Frances. US Senate Commerce Committee Testimony. October 5, 2021. The full text of Haugen's Senate testimony is publicly available through the Senate record. It is essential primary source material for this chapter, covering the structural dynamics of the integrity vs. growth conflict, the MSI algorithm change, teen mental health research, and the epistemics of internal corporate knowledge. Haugen is a technically sophisticated witness and the testimony is unusually substantive. Appropriate for all levels.

2. Silverman, Craig. "This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook." BuzzFeed News, November 16, 2016. The foundational journalistic analysis of fake news engagement during the 2016 election. Silverman's team compared Facebook engagement from the twenty most-viral fake news stories to engagement from the twenty top stories from major news organizations, finding that fake news outperformed real news on every metric. The methodology is described in detail and the limitations are acknowledged. Essential for the election case study. Appropriate for all levels.

3. Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2014): 8788–8790. The original emotional contagion study. Reading the actual paper — including the brief ethics statement and the methodology section — is considerably more illuminating than reading reports about it. The study is short (three pages) and the methodology is accessible to undergraduates. Essential primary source. Appropriate for all levels.

4. Zuckerberg, Mark. "A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement." Facebook, November 15, 2018. One of several public posts in which Zuckerberg addressed the platform's approach to content moderation and algorithmic curation. Reading this document alongside the internal documents disclosed by Haugen illustrates the gap between public framing and internal knowledge. Available on Facebook's newsroom. Appropriate for all levels.

5. Wall Street Journal. "The Facebook Files." Series published September–October 2021. The WSJ series that initiated the Haugen disclosure cycle. Each installment covers a specific domain: teen mental health, the MSI algorithm change, internal research on misinformation, and others. The series is available on WSJ.com (some content behind paywall). Essential background for Case Study 02. Appropriate for all levels.

Books: History and Analysis of Facebook

6. Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Roger McNamee. Penguin Press, 2019. McNamee was an early and enthusiastic investor in Facebook who became an increasingly vocal critic of the company's practices. The book traces his journey from advocate to critic and provides an insider's analysis of Facebook's business model and its political consequences. Accessible, opinionated, and usefully positioned: McNamee's credibility as a former supporter makes his critique harder to dismiss as outsider ignorance. Appropriate for all levels.

7. The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. David Kirkpatrick. Simon & Schuster, 2010. A detailed journalistic history of Facebook's founding through approximately 2009. Written with significant access to Zuckerberg and senior Facebook leadership, it provides important context for the early News Feed decisions. Its publication predates most of the platform's problematic development, making it useful for understanding origins rather than consequences. Appropriate for all levels.

8. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination. Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. HarperCollins, 2021. A deeply reported narrative history of Facebook from approximately 2015 through 2020, drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and former employees. Covers the 2016 election response, the MSI algorithm change, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the early stages of the teen mental health research controversy. The best single-volume account of Facebook's recent history. Appropriate for all levels.

9. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. Antonio Garcia Martinez. Harper, 2016. A memoir by a former Facebook product manager covering the company's advertising technology development and product culture. Provides an insider's view of how Facebook's advertising machine was built and how product decisions were made in the 2012–2013 period. Opinionated, profane, and revealing about the values and incentive structures that shaped Facebook's development. Appropriate for mature undergraduate and graduate readers.

Books: The Attention Economy and Platform Power

10. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Tim Wu. Knopf, 2016. A comprehensive history of the attention economy from nineteenth-century newspapers through digital social media. Wu situates Facebook and its predecessors within a longer history of commercial enterprises that derived revenue from capturing and selling human attention. Essential context for understanding Facebook's business model not as a technological novelty but as the latest iteration of a century-long pattern. Appropriate for all levels.

11. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir Eyal. Portfolio, 2014. A practical manual for product designers on building habit-forming products, including discussion of variable ratio reinforcement, trigger-action-reward-investment loops, and engagement optimization techniques. The book is written as a how-to guide rather than a critique, making it valuable for understanding the explicit design logic of the systems this chapter criticizes. Note that Eyal has subsequently written about "indistractable" behavior and has modified some of his positions. Appropriate for all levels.

12. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Shoshana Zuboff. PublicAffairs, 2019. A landmark theoretical work analyzing the business model of surveillance capitalism — the extraction and commodification of behavioral data for the purpose of predicting and modifying human behavior. Zuboff's framework provides the most comprehensive theoretical vocabulary available for analyzing what Facebook's News Feed algorithm actually is and does. Dense but important. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Academic Research

13. Bakshy, Eytan, Solomon Messing, and Lada A. Adamic. "Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook." Science 348, no. 6239 (2015): 1130–1132. The 2015 study funded by Facebook that found algorithmic curation exposed users to slightly more cross-cutting political content than social filtering alone. Reading this study alongside subsequent research and the Haugen disclosures about what internal research found reveals the gap between public-facing research and internal findings. Methodology section is accessible; appropriate for advanced undergraduates.

14. Verduyn, Philippe, et al. "Passive Facebook Usage Undermines Affective Well-Being: Experimental and Longitudinal Evidence." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 2 (2015): 480–488. One of the key academic studies on the relationship between passive social media consumption and wellbeing — the research that Facebook cited in its public framing of the 2018 MSI algorithm change. Reading the actual study reveals what the research does and does not say, and what Facebook's framing emphasized and elided. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates.

15. Bail, Christopher A., et al. "Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 37 (2018): 9216–9221. A study that found increased exposure to cross-partisan social media content actually increased political polarization rather than reducing it — a finding that complicates simple narratives about filter bubbles. The study design is accessible and its findings are directly relevant to the 2016 election discussion. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates.

16. Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. "Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election." Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 211–236. A careful economic analysis of fake news in the 2016 election, including estimates of exposure, believability, and the methodological challenges of measuring electoral effects. More cautious in its conclusions than some journalistic accounts, and useful for understanding what economic methods can and cannot establish about causal effects. Appropriate for advanced undergraduates.

Policy and Regulatory Context

17. European Union Digital Services Act (DSA). Regulation (EU) 2022/2065. The full text of the DSA is publicly available. Chapter III covers obligations for very large online platforms, including transparency requirements for algorithmic recommendation systems, prohibition of certain targeting practices, and requirements for risk assessments of systemic risks. Comparing the regulatory requirements to the practices documented in this chapter reveals the gap between current requirements and comprehensive accountability. Appropriate for policy-focused advanced undergraduates.

18. Harris, Tristan. "How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist." Medium, May 18, 2016. Harris's influential essay, written before he became a public figure through the Center for Humane Technology and the documentary "The Social Dilemma," provides an accessible introduction to the persuasive design principles embedded in social media products. The essay is framed from the perspective of an insider who designed these systems and concluded they were harmful. Appropriate for all levels.

Documentary

19. The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski. Netflix, 2020. A documentary featuring interviews with former employees of major social media companies — including Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, and others — discussing the persuasive design principles, business model incentives, and harms they believe their work produced. The film is not without limitations — it centers on the perspectives of wealthy Silicon Valley insiders and sometimes overstates certainty where research is contested — but it provides accessible presentation of the core arguments about attention economy design. Appropriate for all levels; useful for in-class discussion.

20. Coded Bias. Directed by Shalini Kantayya. 2020. A documentary examining algorithmic bias in facial recognition and other AI systems, centered on the work of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini. While not specifically about social media feeds, the film provides essential context on how algorithmic systems produce discriminatory outcomes and the challenges of accountability for algorithmic decision-making. Appropriate for all levels; provides important perspective on who bears the costs of algorithmic harm.