[NewView]

I look at most of what facebook does from a macro data perspective as a) their targeted advertising goal, which can be looked at as good or bad, i'm mostly ambivalent and b) doing whatever they can to open the Chinese market. Facebook can only really grow from its current valuation by either showing that targeted ads work better than blanket ads or by growing their user base by adding the 1/6th of the global population that can't access them. China won't let facebook and twitter operate there because it fears them being used as a platform for organizing dissent, like in Egypt (Zuck was feverishly downplaying the role of facebook in overthrowing the government in 2011), so facebook uses keyword identifying programs to send certain news articles to certain feeds. If it can show the Chinese government that people psychologically respond to certain key words, news feeds, peer pressure movements, etc it allows the chinese government to "open up" and allow facebook et al in. Theoretically it would then allow the government to covertly manipulate people through innocuous news articles or social groups or what have you.