A couple of thoughts about the @WSJ Facebook story today.

First, we've heard this before. "some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias." I have no doubt that this was part of the reason FB resisted change.

But there is an older, deeper reason. It's well documented in @StevenLevy's new book, Facebook: The Inside Story. The status quo of favoring engagement over every other value came from the early commitment to user growth at all costs. High emotion is sticky. Extremism is sticky.

Any adjustment to reduce the power of engagement and de-radicalize Facebook would have hurt conservatives more in the US. But that's only because US conservatives are now overtly racist and nativist. In other places it would have hurt protesters, reformers, and critics a bit.

Note that like so many FB stories, this one seems only concerned with the potential effects on the US. That's partly because FB cared so much about its reputation among Republicans when they ran both houses and the WH.

But there is always so much more to this story. The status quo of FB's commitment to engagement and growth does the most damage in places where politics are more fractured and democracy thinner, like the Philippines, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. That's the real story.

That's what I tried to get my book to cover. The US matters less to FB every day. India matters more to FB every day.

My second observation is that the ideology that guides FB is a paternalistic fear of looking paternalistic. FB chooses for us who we interact with in our Newsfeed. It chooses for us what Groups we discover through its recommendations. It recommends to us Friends we never met.

FB could not be more paternalistic. That Kaplan and others used a fear of LOOKING paternalistic is hilarious.

Zuckerberg has always thought he knows best for us. That's expressed in all of his big speeches. He knows what we want and what we need because he has the data on 2.5 billion people and all we have are our subjective experiences and values.

So HE creates "community" through Groups. HE tells us what matters about privacy and why. HE makes choices and watches as we passively conform, signaling to Zuck that we approve by acclimation.