Social media algorithms govern our view of the world. Good luck in trying to stop them.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we’ve lost control of what we see, read – and even think – for the biggest social media companies.

I put it just around 2016. It was the year that Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Run by robots programmed to hold our attention for as long as possible, they promoted things we were likely to exploit, share, or love – and buried everything else.

Goodbye, streams that showed everything and everyone we were following in an endless, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high energy streams that burst with must-see clicks.

Around the same time, Facebook – whose news feed has been powered by algorithms since 2009 – hid the setting to revert to “Most Recent.”

Not much, you probably thought, if you thought about it at all. Except that these opaque algorithms have not only maximized the news of T. Swift’s latest albums. They also maximized the reach of the arsonist – attacks, misinformation, conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.