Simple algorithms: Things that people vote appear higher on the feed. Things that people click on, are also shown to other people in the same group. You can tar

Simple algorithms: Things that people vote appear higher on the feed. Things that people click on, are also shown to other people in the same group. You can target your message (ads) to a specific group. It looks harmless, but our amplifying algorithms gave a voice and a platform that led to this event. They created huge echo chambers with different set of facts and realities for different groups. If you look deeply, this is partly our fault. I may get downvoted for this. HN also has this variant of voting algorithm, and in a way it is an echo chamber of “what we think is true”. Just look at all the extreme FB hate comments. I don’t have good answers other than, we really really need to invest in fact checking technology that is open, introspectable and objective. It is so easy to spread hate and half truths that look like real truths. We humans are wired to get dopamine hits from surprising/extreme/unusual information. It excites us so we click. The algorithms amplify it. Done at the scale of billions of people, it changes the fabric of society. While we as devs are merely making “integer count field in a database” and a “react view that shows items in an array sorted by counts” that ends up shifting what the viewers believe in. We are what we read and share.