Tech companies have successfully weaponized "the algorithm" as a shield of plausible deniability.
Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible.
But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it.
Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower.
The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans.
We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta.
The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example.
And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.
Google was probably the most successful at this and one of the earliest. So often we'd hear about something getting removed or upranked or downranked and here "well, that's the algorithm". The implication is they're not responsible.
But all algorithms, particularly ranking algoirthms and news feeds, are merely a means of reflecting the wishes of the people who design and maintain them. Every ranking decision has a human decision behind it.
Go back to Google's war on content farms. While this was justified, it demonstrates the principle: some teams at Google decided it was a problem, then designed some ML systems to decide if a given site was a content farm ("high quality" vs "low quality", etc) and then plugged that feature into the search ranking system and then tweaked ranking so those sites ranked lower.
The point is it's never "the algorithm". It's always humans.
We see this with the US government's war on Tiktok. This really has nothing to do with the risk of Chinese interference. If that was ap roblem, more serious efforts would've been made to tackle interference by Russia and other countries through existing companies like Meta.
The real problem with Tiktok (from the US government's perspective) is that it doesn't play ball with US State Department policy. You get to actually see things happening in the world that IG, Googke, Youtube, FB, etc intentionally suppress, both by ranking them lower and making it ridiculously easy to abuse content safety systems to remove such content by brigading it (this is a problem on Tiktok too but at least it exists to be brigaded). What's happening in Gaza is th emost pertinent example.
And then we have Elon Musk who buys Twitter to basically push his own political views.