• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 15, 2015

A glitch on Facebook’s mobile site allowed users to see how many views their posts and other people’s posts received, according to The Verge, which first reported the news this week. The bug also revealed view counts for content from publishers, brands, and organizations including shared or posted links and some photos. Facebook is working to fix the bug and remove the page count information.

The Verge points out that view counts for some of these links may be aggregates for all views across Facebook, combining posts by multiple different users. However for relatively unique content like shared photos, they may be a fair reflection of their actual popularity across the social network.

While access to this kind of information may undermine users’ self-esteem for obvious reasons, the discovery of the bug raises an interesting question: why exactly doesn’t Facebook share this data with its users anyway? Its value to users is pretty clear -- who wouldn’t want to know how many times their content was actually viewed, in addition to how many “likes” it gets?

This information is readily available but deliberately withheld by Facebook, which as The Verge points out likes to keep its inner workings quite mysterious, in part because sharing this data would give a peek under the cover of its distribution strategy. Thus, if a particular post received a relatively small number of views, you could deduce that Facebook wasn’t actually showing it to most of your friends.

Of course, all this just serves to illustrate the basic hypocrisy at the heart of Facebook’s content model. On the surface, as summarized in its mission statement, Facebook aims to “give people the power to share make the world more open and connected.” But when it comes to the most basic data about its core functionality -- information that everyone knows exists, and would be easy enough to share -- Facebook chooses concealment in order to better manipulate its users.