Why you can no longer expect that the news will find you

[Commentary] Most people know that Facebook manipulates their News Feed, and a lot of that manipulation is not at all noteworthy (do you really need to see the 892nd picture of the toddler born to the girl who sat next to you in 10th grade biology?).

Go ahead, wander over to Facebook and refresh your news feed eight or ten times in a row: you’ll get a different series of updates at the top of that feed nearly every time.

But when Facebook starts altering the content of your feed based on an emotional social graph it wishes to feed you, that makes a lot of people sit up and take notice. And in an era in which Facebook is one of the largest sources of referral traffic to traffic-starved online publishers struggling to break even in an era of digital pennies, the ramifications of those alterations have a clear impact on how you get your news and the type of news you get.