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Perhaps Facebook no longer fully understands its own tangle of algorithms--the code, all sixty million lines of it, is a palimpsest, where engineers and layer upon layer of new commands.

[...] Google has explicitly built its search engine to reflect values that it holds dear. It believes that the popularity of a Web site gives a good sense of its utility; it chooses to suppress pornography in its search results and not, say, anti-Semitic conspiracists; it believes that users will b…

[...] even as an algorithm mindlessly implements its procedures--and even as it learns to see new patterns in the data--it reflects the minds of its creators, the motives of its trainers. Both Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to make recommendations about books and films. [...] the algorithms make…

[...] A system is a human artifact, not a mathematical truism. The origins of the algorithm are unmistakably human, but human fallibility isn't a quality that we associate with it. When algorithms reject a loan application or set the price for an airline flight, they seem impersonal and unbending. …

[...] Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that's a surface trait. In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit …