I'm hoping your class at least covered, in depth, Gerbner's "
Cultivation Theory" within the context of social media and/or made Chomsky's
Manufacturing Consent, required reading.
Sure, you had cursory knowledge that they use "likes" and profile data to manipulate advertising content via their proprietary algorithms but, as I said, that's pretty common knowledge. Perhaps your paper went into more detail than most people have access to.
But, yeah, I'm questioning your claim that somehow you (and your undergraduate class) knew of this exact experiment that Facebook was running, around the time they were running it, given that they didn't tell anyone until after the fact. Somehow you and your class had the insider info that FB hadn't released to the public and somehow the rest of the world was oblivious to it? That seems far-fetched to me.
If you really did, and the proof is in your research as you claim it is, then simply copy and paste your bibliography. I have university-level access to most major journals, so I can easily obtain copies of articles to see if they do, indeed, spill the beans on this study before FB had ever publicly released info on it.
This situation, as cornflake and Richard have more-patiently-than-I-am-capable-of pointed out, is entirely different than simply using profile data and "likes" to focus advertising content. They tweaked an algorithm to intentionally manipulate the emotional states of their users by manipulating their News Feeds.
To our knowledge, this has not been done before, at least not on this scale and/or by a company like this.
Thankfully, the experimental design was shitty and their results were non-significant to the point of nearly being non-existent, and are therefore useless. But, the ethical issues remain.