Wikipedia
Al-Khwarizmi Wikipedia
The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science Bernard Chazelle
...Algorithms are—and should be understood as—works of literature. The simplest ones are short vignettes that loop through a trivial algebraic calculation to paint fractals, those complex, pointillistic pictures much in vogue in the sci-fi movie industry. Just a few lines long, these computing zingers will print the transcendental digits of pi, sort huge sets of numbers, model dynamical systems, or tell you on which day of the week your 150th birthday will fall
What is the algorithm and what it does in social media? reddit
..."The" algorithm — the one that a particular social media site (like Facebook or Twitter) uses — is actually a collection of multiple different algorithms, all working together to decide what to show you next. (HephaistosFnord)
...When people talk about "the algorithm", they're usually talking about the method by which a social media platform presents you with information — whose posts you see first, how often you see someone's posts. By making small tweaks to this algorithm, these companies can "surface" wildly different information to you. Done on a mass scale, this can widely alter the things people read and thus the things they believe or understand. (CyclopsRock)
All Hail The Algorithm Al Jazeera (A five-part series exploring the impact of algorithms on our everyday lives)
Are You There God? It's Me, The Algorithm
Will Allstetter at syntaxmag
...In the Algorithm's shadowy complexity, its role as a mundane, simple rule follower is lost. With a general cultural resignation to recommendation algorithms' eerie power—it's borderline hackneyed to note when you get an ad for a product you were just talking about—these spiritual TikToks raise the stakes further, implying an even more paranoid proposition. A proposition rooted in the nagging belief that the Algorithm is too powerful to be just a simple computer program. It proposes that the Algorithm might actually be able to prophesize and influence my fate. So, I obey, and click record, just to be safe.
Adapting Kant, media theorist Vincent Mosco offers an explanation for the inclination to transform the Algorithm's seemingly knowledgeable illegibility into an ineffable, spiritually resonant force. He dubs this modern experience of unknowable and pseudo-religious mechanical scale the digital sublime, a feeling that arises from machinery that "achieves transcendence through astonishment, awe, terror, and psychic distance." Contact between the individual and the Algorithm operates at that same psychic distance; everything behind the screen is too abstract, too large, and too secretive to understand. Logic and reason are replaced with awe.
...The Algorithm's computerized, calculating underpinning allows no imagination in its mysticism. The promise of an unrealized future and the possibility of meaning beyond the current, hierarchized systems is absent from this wholly digital belief system. Even in its mysticism, then, the Algorithm's spirituality—thanks to its rule-based underpinnings—cannot escape an implicit commitment to a traditional, linear, and computationally rational logic. By nature of the digital, computers are designed to logically reason a response to inputs rather than allowing for an awesome mystical unknown.
...In reality, The Algorithm is a mundane, deeply human, and constructed system that is heavily influenced by the environment it was built in. Its conclusion-centric, rule-following nature precludes the possibility of a visionary future, a future that is mystical not because it is godly, but because it allows for indeterminacy and change.
Sadly, unseating The Algorithm's mystical perception is almost prohibitively hard in our current algorithmic landscape. Rather than mundane rationality being the downfall of this spirituality, it is neatly folded into its credibility. A unique doublethink is bred. The computer probably isn't wrong (it's a glorified calculator!), I'm just missing some spiritual truth it's picked up on. When the black box is introduced, a combination of impenetrable structures and apparent super-intelligence sells the Algorithm as all-knowing. We mere mortals cannot compete.
The algorithm will see you now Deena Mousa (on AI and radiology)
Social media algorithm: 2025 guide for all major networks Michelle Martin at hootsuite
...A social media algorithm is a collection of rules, ranking signals, and calculations that decide the content priority and display order for each user.
AI-powered social media algorithms determine what we see every time we open a social media app and use machine learning to constantly evolve and personalize the user experience.
Back in 2000, when the first social media platforms like SixDegrees, MySpace, and Facebook first emerged, algorithms were purely chronological. Users saw content from people they followed (and later, brands) from most recent to oldest.
However, as social media gained popularity, complex algorithms started curating content based on user behavior and interests. Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm was a pioneer, first launched in 2006 and replaced in 2011 by more advanced algorithms.
And in 2025, every modern social platform ranks and displays content based on its own social media algorithms — except Bluesky, where chronological is the default. Some platforms, such as X, Facebook, and Instagram, also still offer a chronological option.
Google algorithm updates searchengineland.com
History of Google Algorithm Updates searchenginejournal.com
In its early years, Google only made a handful of updates to its algorithms. Now, Google makes thousands of changes every year.
Algorithm Nation
Jacob Weisberg at NYRB
In the early years of social media, algorithms were often seen in a positive light. Barack Obama's first term, coinciding with the Arab Spring, was a hopeful time for the antiauthoritarian potential of Facebook and its quirkier cousin Twitter. But as the revolution fizzled in Tahrir Square, some of the early idealists began raising concerns about the possibility that these platforms could become forces of propaganda and polarization. In 2011 Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, warned of what was coming in a book called The Filter Bubble, predicting a balkanizing information landscape in which conservatives would get conservative news and liberals liberal news.
...It was an accurate prophecy. That same year Facebook replaced its reverse chronological “newsfeed” with an algorithm that prioritized posts based on interactions, past behavior, and time spent. Twitter and YouTube soon followed suit in adopting algorithmic, as opposed to chronological or search-based, curation. The algorithmic evolution of these platforms heightened their potential for harm. As DiResta astutely observes, “At its worst, Twitter made mobs—and Facebook grew cults.” One of those cults was the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon, which matured on Facebook into a violent subculture.
Filter bubbles meant that people who were more engaged with mainstream media seldom saw the dank memes launched by troll factories like Russia's Internet Research Agency. And most people weren't aware until after the 2016 election that Facebook itself had helped the Trump campaign microtarget incendiary messages and fundraising appeals.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed the company's unauthorized release of user data for political advertising, social media platforms went through a period of soul-searching about their function as global conduits for antidemocratic disinformation.
Facebook's new policy, DiResta writes, was to "remove, reduce, and inform." "Remove" meant blocking foreign election interference. "Reduce" meant overriding the platform's newsfeed algorithm to demote or "throttle" undesirable content. "Inform" meant attaching a pop-up notice about fact-checking on posts that contained disputed information. All the leading platforms were now on the lookout for "coordinated inauthentic behavior"—bots in St. Petersburg impersonating moms in Tennessee, say. Ahead of the 2020 election Mark Zuckerberg took the suggestion of the Harvard law professor Noah Feldman and created an independent oversight board with the power to override Facebook's decisions about removing content.
...The algorithm has become, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, the dominant medium of the digital age. The way it selects, curates, and presents information shapes our perspectives on the world in ways comparable to earlier information technologies like the printing press, radio, and television.
New Media Rules NYRB 11x25
I think it's important to recognize that algorithms are not forces of nature. They're not just there. They're designed and developed by people, and they reflect their developers' biases and assumptions, often unintentionally. And sometimes they reflect, quite explicitly, what their creators do and don't want people to see.
Ted Striphas Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet
...while this book begins and ends in the present, along the way it’s a primarily historical account of how the terms algorithm and culture came to be entangled before computing became personal, mobile, wearable, implantable, ubiquitous, or otherwise—that is, before computing became "everyware." (7)
... algorithms are administering the boundaries between familiar and family, kith and kin, in apportioning economic resources, healthcare, and social services. In other words, they’re performing critical, cultural work, as most social networking technologies do. (68)
...the words algorithm, culture, algorithmic culture, and accompanying vocabulary may delimit an object domain, but more important is the historical baggage they carry with them. They’re touchstones by means of which to assess the terms and conditions of the technological age in which we’re living, and of the future( s) whose contours are just now starting to emerge. (228)
...perhaps, then, some or all of those terms might appear in a more up-to-date vocabulary of algorithmic culture: access, amplify, analog, anonymous, app, artificial, assistant, authentic, bully, cancel, cloud, code, comment, computer, connection, cookie, copy, curation, data, delete, design, digital, engagement, exploit, fake, file, free, friend, game, Google, graph, hack, hashtag, influence, information, intelligence, interface, learning, like, love, machine, meme, memory, message, mine, mobile, moderation, neighbor, network, news, password, phone, pirate, platform, post, privacy, profile, reality, reputation, save, screen, search, security, server, share, social, source, spam, status, story, trend, troll, tweet, user, viral, virus, wearable, web. (244)...The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics
..."The algorithm" is just a joke-y way to say "I have no idea why this social media site is showing me _____". (brael)
...Operating on a gigantic scale at imperceptibly quick speeds, TikTok's algorithm (at least to my small fleshy brain) appears to be a transcendental force, surpassing the limits of human perception and cognition. I'm shown video after strikingly-accurate-to-my-life video, with no room for thought in-between. Each has tens of thousands of likes. The messy code is tucked away behind a hypnotizing, oracular UI. The information delivered emanates quickly and seamlessly from the screen. What's more, TikTok, and its other corporate contemporaries, are notoriously cagey about the mechanics that drive their algorithms. As the user, I'm prompted to believe that the algorithm is all-knowing, all-seeing, and smart. Awe-inspiringly smart. Effortlessly omniscient. It captures me, it knows me. But I only have vague contours of its method.
Find out what social media algorithms are and how to navigate the ranking signals of each platform to get your content seen.
Google has a long history of famous algorithm updates, search index changes and refreshes. Here is a timeline of major Google search algorithm updates.
Google's algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking factors to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).
...How did we get to this place, where mirror realities have replaced shared facts? The answer has something to do with the use of algorithms to personalize social media feeds. The concept of an algorithm as a set of instructions for solving an algebraic equation goes back to Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a ninth-century Persian mathematician. (The term algorithm derives from a Latinization of his name.) The colloquial usage to mean a personalized recommendation engine is quite recent. Amazon began using an algorithmic technique known as collaborative filtering in the late 1990s to suggest products based on purchases by users with similar proclivities. Recommendation algorithms were the secret recipes behind services like Spotify and Netflix, the formulas that made them addictive and fueled their exponential growth. To DiResta, algorithms and the people who are able to manipulate them most effectively are our new “invisible rulers.” She borrows the phrase from Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, who used it in his 1928 book Propaganda to describe the hidden shapers of public opinion.
Jacob Weisberg: Like a lot of technology, algorithms are not good or bad in themselves. We have to recognize how the algorithm has itself become a medium, in Marshall McLuhan's sense of the term. If you think about it that way, the algorithm's defining characteristic is personalization. In the news business, that's what the technology has made possible. You couldn't personalize the CBS evening news. But now the news can be tailored to anyone's interests or tastes. That's also what creates the potential for manipulation and harm.
...I define algorithmic culture, provisionally, in two ways: first, as the use of computational processes to sort, classify, and prioritize people, places, objects, and ideas; and second, as the repertoires of thought, conduct, expression, and feeling that flow from and back into those processes. (5)