Why should Facebook be sorry for conducting a huge study that tried to manipulate users’ emotions by jiggering which posts users saw, all without telling them?

To be sorry, you need incentive. You need to want to be better, do better, make your victim feel better. Why should Facebook want any of these things? We hear over and over how Facebook is misusing our data, compromising our privacy, not giving us control over our own feeds, making us pay for people to see our Pages. (I could provide links, but do you really need me to? Are you living under a rock? Can you make fire? How did you find SorryWatch, anyway — did your cat walk across the keyboard and randomly type in our URL?) And yet we stick around.

Facebook has no incentive to apologize in a genuine way because Facebook has all the power. You have none. Except to leave Facebook. You can, you know. Go on, leave. Do it. Do it now. Have you done it yet? Do. Go play in your Google Circles. (AHAHAHAHAHAHA.)

As the NYT’s Mike Isaac points out in a Bits column, FB keeps apologizing for privacy-related offenses, then keeps on keepin’ on at the behavior it economically depends on. And you don’t take a hike, because you need Facebook more than Facebook needs any individual you, or even tens of thousands of yous.

I include myself in this “you.” I love using FB to see what’s going on in my friends’ lives, to look at their photos of kids and cats and vacations on Lake Como (screw you, Kathy), to network and to say I have a story in Real Simple this month (I have a story in Real Simple this month) (not the story about apologies; that was last month; this is a different story), to find links to news stories and Buzzfeed quizzes my friends think are important, to get or provide a quick laugh. Twitter feels too frenetic and performance-y and one-liner-ish. I’m too old for Instagram and Tumblr (and they’re too visually driven and not conversation-y anyway). Facebook provides something no one else does, and Facebook knows it.

Anyway, Sheryl Sandberg of FB said: “This was part of ongoing research companies do to test different products, and that was what it was; it was poorly communicated. And for that communication we apologize. We never meant to upset you.”

Uh, Sher, it wasn’t poorly communicated. It wasn’t communicated at all. That is the point of a study on unwitting people; you can’t tell them they’re being studied. What you could have done is NOT DO THE STUDY. If you’re only apologizing “for that communication,” then you’re not apologizing at all. Because the offense was DOING THE STUDY.

You may read in the news that the lead scientist of the study, Adam D.I. Kramer, “offered a lengthy apology” on FB. This is not true. Read it.

OK so.

Starting a post with “OK so” and a period is the equivalent of starting an apology with a sigh. It is aggrieved. It has the tone of explaining something very basic to a small child. The reason he and his colleagues did the research on over 700,000 unwitting people is because “we care about the emotional impact of Facebook.” HE CARES, PEOPLE. He is a sensitive, sensitive giver. That was his entire motive. He cares about people feeling good and happy. (I can tell, because his nickname on FB is “Danger Muffin” and this is his current banner and profile pic.)

SECONDARILY, he is concerned that if people feel not-good and not-happy because of what their friends post on FB, people won’t use FB anymore. So maybe FB should just do a wee spot of research to ascertain whether this thesis is true, not because FB would ever consider REALLY filtering out negative posts, but just, you know, because FB was curious, like a kitten.

ALSO, OK so, sigh: “Nobody’s posts were ‘hidden,’ they just didn’t show up on some loads of Feed.” It wasn’t hidden; you just couldn’t SEE IT. Maybe if you had a doctorate you would understand this important difference. Oh, you do have a doctorate? Well, it must be in something non-Facebook. If you realized there was a comma splice in Adam’s sentence, maybe your doctorate is in English literature.

Anyway, OK so, sigh, you don’t have to worry because the research showed that the impact of manipulating the emotional content of the feed (or, in FB-ese, Feed, which is also the name of a National-Book-Award-nominated young adult dystopian novel by M.T. Anderson, which focuses on a future in which a corporate-run feed in everyone’s head has “omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires,” and the world is completely at the mercy of corporate control and data mining and people get round-the-clock targeted advertising beamed directly into their brainpans, but why did I go off on this tangent, I have NO IDEA whatsoever, comma splice) was negligible. If there wasn’t that much impact on people’s emotions or use of Facebook, it is clearly no big deal that FB did this research. Maybe if we’d found that manipulating people’s emotions without their knowledge made people kill themselves, we’d have something to apologize for!

Also, “our goal was never to upset anyone.” HOWEVER, “my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.” We’re not sorry for DOING the paper; like our pal Sheryl, we’re apologizing for the way we COMMUNICATED about the paper. After the fact. And the fact that anxiety was caused, in a passive way. For which we blame the paper, not ourselves, the humans who wrote it, and designed the study, and were paid by Facebook, which has everyone’s emotional interests at heart, nobly. Also, you really should get a handle on “all of this anxiety” you have. We’re working on a study about beaming Ativan ads directly into your cerebral cortex.