Protesters in Ferguson, Mo. (Photograph by Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

The weeks of late summer are usually devoid of major news. Not this year. The Aug. 9 slaying of unarmed teenager Mike Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., has led to a week of protests, arrests, and the deployment of the National Guard.

At the same time, but seemingly in a different universe, there’s the “ice bucket challenge,” a series of videos in which celebrities and other people indicate their support of fighting ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, by dumping cold water on their heads. The unexpectedly viral campaign has raised $15 million for the cause.

Both of those stories have illuminated the strengths and weaknesses of our two major social networks that function as windows to the world—Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR).

As others have pointed out, Twitter has become a gripping nightly forum to follow the protests in Ferguson. National journalists such as CNN’s Jake Tapper are tweeting from the scene while a few relative unknowns like Vice reporter Tim Pool have delivered riveting live video of the protests. Twitter has surpassed the major news networks in providing a visceral sense of an unfolding social disaster and in provoking attendant outrage in many who think the police have badly overreached.

At the same time, Facebook seems devoid of unhappy news from Ferguson and elsewhere, with some complaining about feeds filled with trivial ice bucket videos, friends’ vacation photos, and (on more of a down note) remembrances and trivia about the late actor Robin Williams. On Facebook, your friends aren’t bearing witness to public demonstrations of civil unrest. They’re in Martha’s Vineyard and really want you to see photos of their kids eating ice cream.

The difference in content highlights how each service approaches presenting the material posted by its users. Facebook’s algorithms filter the news, presenting a selective feed of updates tailored to a user’s individual preferences and past actions. Twitter, on the other hand, lets all it all fly: Each post from people that you follow is presented in chronological order, untainted by an invisible hand.

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SOURCE: Brad Stone 
Businessweek