How Facebook Algorithms Can Fight Over Your Feed

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 result of a tangle of conflicting algorithms, reflecting their creators’ sometimes contradictory goals. Legislators determined to rein them in are just beginning to grapple with the legal and technical challenges.

A set of instructions for making a decision or performing a task. Arranging names in alphabetical order is a kind of algorithm; so is a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies. But those simple formulas bear only a distant relationship to the computerized code that companies that Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. spend billions of dollars on each year.