When Is an Algorithm?
The case of Facebook’s trending controversy and other instances of “humanizing algorithms” do not merely call the source of agency into question but suggest that the more politically poignant question to ask is when agency is located, on whose behalf and for what purpose? The real controversy was not the fact that Facebook employs journalism graduates to intervene in an algorithmic decision-making process by adding their editorial human judgments of newsworthiness to the mix. The controversy lies in the selective human and nonhuman agency. What became apparent in the public reaction to the Facebook trending controversy was the fact that algorithms only mater sometimes. This, I want to suggest, constitutes an important dimension of thinking around the politics of algorithms—politics not as what algorithms do per se but how and under what circumstances diferent aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic are made available—or unavailable—to specific actors in particular setings.19 By shifting atention away from the proper source of action toward the practices of mobilizing sources of action in specific circumstances, we might be able to understand both how and when algorithms come to mater (the matering of algorithms is taken up again in chapter 6).20 Why is it that, sometimes, an algorithm is blamed for discrimination when, on a similar but diferent occasion, a human is “accused” of bias? Why is it contentious that Facebook employs journalism graduates in the process of curating the trending feature when, in the context of news organizations, the opposite seems to be considered problematic? Put diferently, why is it OK for Facebook to use algorithms when doing the same thing is considered problematic for a news organization? These and similar questions cannot simply be answered by adhering to a vocabulary of essences. Algorithms are not given; they are not either mathematical expressions or expressions of human intent but emerge as situated, ongoing accomplishments. That is, they emerge as more or less technical/nonhuman or more or less social/human because of what else they are related to. In the case of the Facebook trending topic incident, the algorithms shifted its configuration as a result of controversy. In the face of widespread accusations against the subjective biases of the human editors, Facebook decided to fire the 26 journalism graduates contracted to edit and write short descriptions for the trending topics module. In a bid to reduce bias, Facebook announced, instead, that they would replace them with robots. While still keeping humans in the loop, “a more algorithmically driven process,” according to Facebook, would “allow our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics” (Facebook, 2016). What is of interest in this case is not whether algorithms or humans govern Facebook’s trending topic but how the diferent categories were enlisted and made relevant in the context of the controversy. That is, the “algorithm” emerged as objective and neutral while humans were seen as subjective and biased. The point is that there is nothing inherently neutral about algorithms or biased about humans, these descriptive markers emerge from particular contexts and practices. It could have been otherwise.21
Neither Black nor Box
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