In Defense of Algorithms

They’re good for us. They might even be good for democracy.

- By Elizabeth Nolan Brown

When Facebook launched in 2004, it was a fairly static collection of profile pages. Facebook users could put lists of favorite media on their "walls" and use the "poke" button to give each other social-media nudges. To see what other people were posting, you had to intentionally visit their pages.

There were no automatic notifications, no feeds to alert you to new information.

In 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed, an individualized homepage for each user that showed friends' posts in chronological order. The change seemed small at the time, but it turned out to be the start of a revolution. Instead of making an active choice to check in on other people's pages, users got a running list of updates.

Users still controlled what information they saw by selecting which people and groups to follow. But now user updates, from new photos to shower thoughts, were delivered automatically, as a chronologically ordered stream of real-time information.

This created a problem. Facebook was growing fast, and users were spending more and more time on it, especially once Apple's iPhone app store brought social media to smartphones. It wasn't long before there were simply too many updates for many people to reasonably follow. Sorting the interesting from the irrelevant became a big task.

But what if there were a way for the system to sort through those updates for users, determining which posts might be most interesting, most relevant, most likely to generate a response? In 2013, Facebook largely ditched the chronological feed.

In its place, the social media company installed an algorithm.