All the News That’s Fit to Like

When Facebook entered the news business in 2006, it set out to cover its own users. Facebook had launched as a static collection of profiles, but now, every time a user uploaded a new photo or changed her favorite quote, the development surfaced in a rolling stream of updates that Facebook called the “News Feed.” Every status update was a “news story”; the algorithm that chose which stories to boost was called “the publisher.” The publisher, Facebook told its users at the time, was interested in stories like “Mark adds...