All social media platforms at some point need to figure out how they are going to generate revenue. Facebook makes money through selling ads that are then displayed on the right side of users' new feeds and pages. They also make money through promoted posts that allow businesses to pay and have their posts featured on users' news feeds more often. These two methods of creating revenue alone have been successful, but Facebook is now allowing Facebook users to pay to promote their friends' posts as well. By paying $7 you can have your or your friend's post appear higher in your friends' news feeds. This new way of generating revenue has been controversial and critics fear that news feeds will soon be filled with promoted posts because of people trying to compete with one another.
       This new Facebook feature will gradually become available to all Facebook users, except those with more than 5,000 friends and followers. This is most likely due to technological issues. Users also won't be able to change the privacy settings of promoted posts either. Therefore, if it is set to only appear in the news feeds of that person's friends, then only your mutual friends with that person will see it. This feature provides Facebook with yet another way to make money through the social media platform, however whether or not it will be used on a regular basis is debatable.
       Many of the comments posted on Mashable's article, "Facebook: Now Pay to Promote Your Friends' Posts", have negative views about the new Facebook feature and most say they would not pay to promote their or their friends' posts. Besides examples like the ones mentioned in the article of promoting a friend's post about them raising money for a charity or promoting a post helping a friend rent their apartment, most people seem disinterested in paying for this feature. One comment was from a person that had actually paid to promote a post one time and they claimed that it didn't show up any higher on their friends' news feeds. Many comments also portray users' worries that this feature will become annoying when people pay to promote ugly pictures of their friends that people post and other posts of that nature. Others are angered with Facebook because it seems like everything with the company turns into money. One comment states, "I thought that Facebook is making enough money. Why is everything with them turning into money. I hate the fact that our profiles space on a page has become so small to make space for all the adds they run to the right of our pages, and I NEVER look at any of them, they limiting the posts people can see that likes your page, you have to pay to promote your own status plus now this? Ridiculous in my opinion."
       I agree with many of the comments myself and don't think that I would pay to promote my friends' posts, nor do I think that this new idea is a good one. Soon enough our news feeds will be filled with promoted posts from our friends and businesses, and we won't actually be reading or looking at anything we might care about. I personally think Facebook needs to reevaluate the effect of this feature 
before permanently making it an option for all Facebook users. 

~Katie