Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

I post a petition on my Facebook page. Which of my friends will see it on their news feed? I have no idea. As soon as I hit send, that petition belongs to Facebook, and the social network’s algorithm makes a judgment about how to best use it. It calculates the odds that it will appeal to each of my friends. Some of them, it knows, often sign petitions, and perhaps share them with their own networks. Others tend to scroll right past. At the same time, a number of my friends pay more attention to me and tend to click the articles I post. The Facebook algorithm takes all of this into account as it decides who will see my petition. For many of my friends, it will be buried so low on their news feed that they’ll never see it. This is what happens when the immensely powerful network we share with 1.5 billion users is also a publicly traded corporation. While Facebook may feel like a modern town square, the company determines, according to its own interests, what we see and learn on its social network. As I write this, about two-thirds of American adults have a profile on Facebook. They spend thirty-nine minutes a day on the site, only four minutes less than they dedicate to face-to-face socializing. Nearly half of them, according to a Pew Research Center report, count on Facebook to deliver at least some of their news, which leads to the question: By tweaking its algorithm and molding the news we see, can Facebook game the political system?