International Business Times (Australia, March 16) -- You may never see this article because a computer didn’t think it was relevant to you, and that’s a matter of great concern to two researchers who led a debate Sunday scrutinizing the growing influence of algorithms, and the cultural biases -- both subtle and overt -- they sometimes reflect. “It’s a scary prospect out there,” Karrie Karahalios, an associate professor at Illinois, told an engaged crowd here at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Also: Fortune (March 18).
Related story: Fusion (March 27) -- A majority of everyday Facebook users in a recent study had no idea that Facebook constructs their experience, pushing certain posts into their stream and leaving others out. In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved,” wrote a team of researchers led by Illinois doctoral student Motahhare Eslami, in a new paper on Facebook’s news feed algorithm.