After much public pressure, Facebook’s responded in August 2016 by diminishing the role of human editors, making “the product more automated,” in that it no longer required people to write descriptions for trending topics (Facebook, 2016). In an interview, Facebook’s manager in charge of news feed, Adam Mosseri, claimed the trending topics section “is a ‘beter’ product without human curators” (Chaykowski, 2016). However, mere days after removing the human curators, socalled fake news started to appear in the trending section. This included a factually incorrect headline involving Fox News personality Megyn Kelly (Ohlheiser, 2016). Laying of 26 employees (19 curators and 7 copyeditors) and puting the robots in charge apparently did not make the trending topic section more accurate or beter. Why Facebook would make any such promise in the first place, given that it repeatedly denies being a media company, is, of course, another question to raise.
At nearly the same time that Facebook fired the journalism graduates editing the trending topic feature and the first accusation of fake news emerged, Facebook became embroiled in another major controversy surrounding its algorithms. In early September 2016, the social media platform came under much public scrutiny for having deleted the famous Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph “The Terror of War.” Nick Ut’s photograph of a naked 9-year-old girl running away in agony after a napalm atack during the Vietnam War was deleted from Facebook for violating the company’s terms of service. Although the image had been deleted from the platform many times before, this time it did not go unnoticed. On September 8, the editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten, Espen Egil Hansen, used the front page to publish an open leter to Mark Zuckerberg, where he expressed a worry about Facebook’s inability to “distinguish between child pornography and a famous war photograph.” “Dear Mark Zuckerberg” the leter began, “[editorial responsibility] should not be undermined by algorithms encoded in your ofice in California.” Like most reporting on the topic of algorithms, Hansen’s leter was quick to construct a dichotomy where the automatic and mechanical contrasted with human decision making. In addition to highlighting a strong concern over Facebook’s growing power as an information intermediary, the incident also says something about the ways in which the algorithm is strategically called out and framed as a potential threat for a democratic society. In what is becoming an all too familiar tale, the algorithm is the villain, and the human—in this case, the press—is portrayed as the hero.
The above controversies call our atention to a particular messy and complex part of the current algorithmic media age. It is not simply that the Facebook algorithm does or does not do certain things—say, censor a famous picture or favor click-bait journalism and the spreading of fake news. What the trending topics controversy, censorship allegations, and fake news story suggest is the extent to which various actors are always diferently involved in seting the stakes for when the algorithm is called out as particularly powerful in specific situations. In chapter 3 the argument was made that algorithms only mater sometimes, and that their power and politics have to do with the circumstances of making them mater in specific ways and for specific purposes. In this chapter I continue this discussion by examining how algorithms are “problematized” in the current media landscape. In writing about the history of sexuality, Foucault described how sexual behavior was “problematized, becoming an object of concern, an element for reflection, and a material for stylization” (2012: 23–24). Similarly, this chapter takes the news industry as a case in point to address the circumstances under which algorithms are rendered more or less problematic, and how their power and politics can be understood by examining the conditions under which algorithms become objects of concern.
Programming the News
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