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.

Evidence of harm is hard to come by.

I think what's happened is that the general public has become much more aware of the destructive power of Wall Street.

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

I set up a company, an algorithmic auditing company myself. I have no clients.

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.

Obviously the more transparency we have as auditors, the more we can get, but the main goal is to understand important characteristics about a black box algorithm without necessarily having to understand every single granular detail of the algorithm.