Programming the News
When Algorithms Come to Matter
“People are beginning to believe what they want.” Such was the explanation for Macquarie Dictionary to name “fake news” the word of the year for 2016. Similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” word of the year 2016, suggesting: “Objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Questions about the status of truth, news, and facts have acquired renewed prominence in the wake of the complex political developments of 2016, particularly with regard to the possible consequences of a misinformed public in the aftermath of the US presidential election. But the arrival of “fake news” and “post-truth” into the popular vocabulary do not merely describe the notion that beliefs and emotions trump facts and truth.1 These concepts are symptomatic of a time when algorithms have emerged as a particularly prominent mater of concern in public discourse. When debates about fake news and whether we live in a post-truth era emerged, they were already part of a much longer and ongoing discussion about the powerful role that social media platforms have in circulating news and information.
In 2016 alone, Facebook was involved in at least three major public controversies surrounding its alleged editorial responsibility. I briefly discussed the first controversy, which centered on the human role of editing what was believed to be a fully automated process for determining trending news, in chapter 3. When the news about Facebook employing human editors to curate its “Trending Topic” section first broke in May 2016, the public response was one of outrage. After all, the algorithm was believed to be neutral, free from human intervention and subjective bias. Through these controversies, among other things, the world learned that algorithms do not function apart from humans. Part of the controversy centered around a belief that humans were interfering with the supposed neutrality of the algorithm. But the mater was made worse by the way it turned out that the humans involved held leftleaning political inclinations. The story became one where politically biased humans deliberately edited out and thereby prevented conservative news from making it into the trending topic section.
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