How recommendation algorithms run the world.
This March, a book that advances an outlandish conspiracy theory—a theory whose name I will not mention—soared in Amazon’s sales rankings. The book’s rise was helped greatly when the e-commerce giant put the book on its carousel of recommended titles, which is shown to shoppers who aren’t searching for that particular book. That fueled more curiosity and sales. Which led to more recommendations. Q The particular conspiracy theory outlined in this book holds that President Donald Trump pretended to collude with Russia precisely to ensure that he would be investigated, which would give him a chance to secretly collaborate with special prosecutor Robert Mueller to investigate and finally arrest former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who belongs to a global satanic cult of pedophiles with Barack Obama and George Soros. Yes, it’s that unhinged. So why is Amazon recommending this book to unsuspecting shoppers? It’s not because this theory has enormous persuasive power or a bestseller-size audience. Blame it on the tyranny of recommendation algorithms.
What should you watch? What should you read? What’s news? What’s trending? Wherever you go online, companies have come up with very particular, imperfect ways of answering these questions. Everywhere you look, recommendation engines offer striking examples of how values and judgments become embedded in algorithms and how algorithms can be gamed by strategic actors.
Consider a common, seemingly straightforward method of making suggestions: a recommendation based on what people “like you” have read, watched, or shopped for. What exactly is a person like me? Which dimension of me? Is it someone of the same age, gender, race, or location? Do they share my interests? My eye color? My height? Or is their resemblance to me determined by a whole mess of “big data” (aka surveillance) crunched by a machine-learning algorithm?
This story is from the May 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the May 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.