Media in the Age of Algorithms

[Commentary] Once Facebook got into the business of curating the newsfeed rather than simply treating it as a timeline, they put themselves in the position of mediating what people are going to see. They became a gatekeeper and a guide. This is not an impossible position. It’s their job. So they’d better make a priority of being good at it. But those who argue strongly for Facebook’s responsibility to weed out the good from the bad also get it wrong.

For the better part of two decades, Google has worked tirelessly to thread the needle between curating an algorithmic feed of a firehose of content that can be created by anyone and simply picking winners and losers. And here’s the key point: they do this without actually making judgments about the actual content of the page. The “truth signal” is in the metadata, not the data.

[Tim O'Reilly is the Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media.]