WHEN FACEBOOK LAUNCHED in 2004, it was a fairly static collection of profile pages. Facebook users could put lists of favorite media on their “walls” and use the “poke” button to give each other social-media nudges. To see what other people were posting, you had to intentionally visit their pages. There were no automatic notifications, no feeds to alert you to new information.
In 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed, an individualized homepage for each user that showed friends’ posts in chronological order. The change seemed small at the time, but it turned out to be the start of a revolution. Instead of making an active choice to check in on other people’s pages, users got a running list of updates.
Users still controlled what information they saw by selecting which people and groups to follow. But now user updates, from new photos to shower thoughts, were delivered automatically, as a chronologically ordered stream of real-time information.
This created a problem. Facebook was growing fast, and users were spending more and more time on it, especially once Apple’s iPhone app store brought social media to smartphones. It wasn’t long before there were simply too many updates for many people to reasonably follow. Sorting the interesting from the irrelevant became a big task.
But what if there were a way for the system to sort through those updates for users, determining which posts might be most interesting, most relevant, most likely to generate a response?
In 2013, Facebook largely ditched the chronological feed. In its place, the social media company installed an algorithm.
Instead of a simple time-ordered log of posts from friends and pages you followed, you saw whichever of these posts Facebook’s algorithms “decided” you should see, filtering content based on an array of factors designed to suss out which content users found more interesting. That algorithm not only changed Facebook; it changed the world, making Facebook specifically—and social media algorithms generally—the subject of intense cultural and political debate.
Nearly a decade later, the list of social ills blamed on algorithms is a long one. Echo chambers. Political polarization. Misinformation. Mental health problems. The election of Donald Trump. Addiction. Extremism. Teen suicides. The election of Joe Biden.
Headlines are full of warnings about algorithms. They “are controlling your life” (Vox), “amplifying misinformation and driving a wedge between people” (The Hill), fueling “massive foreign propaganda campaigns” (The Conversation), and serving as a “radicalization machine for the far-right” (The Daily Beast), to list a few.
Congress has been fretting too. Tech companies use “algorithms to drive destructive content to children,” according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.). Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) claims that Google algorithms dictate the outcomes of elections, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) says Amazon algorithms are “feeding misinformation loops.” And Facebook algorithms “undermine our shared sense of objective reality” and “intensify fringe political beliefs,” according to Reps. Anna Eshoo (D–Calif.) and Tom Malinowski (D–N.J.).
Algorithms, especially those used by search engines and social media, have become a strange new front in the culture war. And at the heart of that battle is the idea of . Algorithms, critics warn, influence individual behavior and reshape political reality, acting as a mysterious digital spell cast by Big Tech over a populace that would
