This question is in the news as a result of Gizmodo's accusation that Facebook intentionally distorts the "trending" list away from conservative viewpoints.
The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo has a must-read column, Facebook's Bias is Built-in, and Bears Watching, about the power of algorithms, not just to do complicated mathematics, but to sway human opinion and even elections:
“Algorithms equal editors,” said Robyn Caplan, a research analyst at Data & Society, a research group that studies digital communications systems. “With Facebook, humans are never not involved. Humans are in every step of the process — in terms of what we’re clicking on, who’s shifting the algorithms behind the scenes, what kind of user testing is being done, and the initial training data provided by humans.”Understanding what algorithms are, and how computers sift and sort and shape data, is as important to citizenship in the digital era as is literacy.
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