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[...] Don Graham's grandfather, Eugene Meyer, spoke of his new duties with solemn obligation:

The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large and not to private interests of its owners. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its materia…

the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economi…

Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of th…

[...] 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…