How Facebook Algorithms Can Fight Over Your Feed: QuickTake

Over the past decade, most of us have gotten used to hearing that “the algorithm” is responsible for this or that on the internet. Sometimes it’s something useful, like movie recommendations. Sometimes it’s not. Facebook is under fire for the way its algorithms shape what nearly 3 billion users see on the world’s largest social media network, including troubling amounts of hate speech and misinformation. But internal company documents provided by a whistle-blower make clear that it’s wrong to think of “the algorithm” as a single bad actor: What users of Facebook and other online platforms see can be the ...