[emodendroket]

"When a film makes you sad you are aware of what's going on" is your claim, but I don't see how that applies to something like, say, Terminator 2, whose entire goal, according to Cameron, was "making the audience cry for the Terminator," yet was not promoted as a sad film. It's hard to come up with a principled difference here.

[tobr]

The Terminator 2 audience knows the film is an authored fictional story. It can make someone cry when they didn’t expect it, but they understand that the filmmakers are intentionally trying to provoke certain emotions. If you can’t see the myriad principled differences between that situation, and logging onto Facebook expecting to see an unfiltered selection of posts, I really can’t believe you are trying hard.

[emodendroket]

If you'll scroll up a bit you'll see this subthread begins when I propose a thought experiment where the "natural" order yields the same results and ask if it's unethical, and people tell me that yes, they think it is. But now you're specifically calling attention to an unmet expectation of "unfiltered" posts (I'd question whether anyone has such an expectation, although the specifics of the curation are not advertised). I think this gets away from what I was talking about in the first place.