Some of the questions from the WIRED list (I haven’t read all of the questions that weren’t answered “I’ll get back to you”) can’t be expected to be answered immediately or exactly, but they are the sorts of things Facebook might be reasonably expected to have some general tracking of, at least well enough to use as some sort of metric for internal developmental purposes, or to justify pricing to advertisers, or something. Nobody would manually count the share buttons, etc. but the Facebook servers can count every time a share button pings the Facebook website, identifying what content is being shared, etc. It’s common for companies to track sales, split by market and region; like buttons aren’t directly sales, but they bring people to Facebook in order to help sales and so I would expect Facebook keeps some metrics about like buttons.
Maybe a better line of questioning would have been something along the lines of what metrics does Facebook track to set goals across the company, and what are the current numbers on those metrics.
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