It's a standard thing you hear from startup people - that their product is somehow improving the world. And if you follow the reasoning, you will get somewhere, and I'll tell you where you get: You'll get to the description of what happens to the winners under the system that they're building.

The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.

Evidence of harm is hard to come by.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.

My fantasy is that there is a new regulatory body that is in charge of algorithmic auditing.

When people are not given an option by some secret scoring system, it's very hard to complain, so they often don't even know that they've been victimized.

It's a standard thing you hear from startup people - that their product is somehow improving the world. And if you follow the reasoning, you will get somewhere, and I'll tell you where you get: You'll get to the description of what happens to the winners under the system that they're building.