More Orwellian than deceitful, because they're using "liked" to represent the aggregate when "likes" is already its own metric, which happens to be lower than the aggregate.
It's kind of funny really - 'did you mean "liked" or "likes"?'
It's fascinating! It would be great to have this information from just normal email -- the data's been there for many years -- but does it seem like privacy invasion then? There doesn't seem to be any difference...
My mail feels private, Facebook doesn't. A lot of people complained loudly when Google started scanning the text of emails to display "relevant" ads. My guess is, there will not be very many people complaining about this.
I suspect it only feels this way to you and me because we know better than to treat anything on Facebook as private, whereas email still feels like it at least should be.
But for my older relatives, and also for a lot of my friends on Facebook, I suspect there is no difference in their minds.
I would imagine that they find it easier to compute the aggregate and display it rather than maintain different values and display it to people (probably helps them at the scale at which they operate? -- lesser things they show, lesser damage it does?).
The number shown is the sum of:
-The number of likes of this URL
-The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook)
-The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL
-The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.