Photo illustration by Lisa Larson- Walker. Photo by Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images. Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action. It scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. For the average Facebook user, that’s more than 1,5. If you have several hundred friends, it could be as many as 1. Then, according to a closely guarded and constantly shifting formula, Facebook’s news feed algorithm ranks them all, in what it believes to be the precise order of how likely you are to find each post worthwhile.

Most users will only ever see the top few hundred. Will Oremus. Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Email him at will. Twitter. No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you. And yet the results of this automated ranking process shape the social lives and reading habits of more than 1 billion daily active users—one- fifth of the world’s adult population.

The algorithm’s viral power has turned the media industry upside down, propelling startups like Buzz. Feed and Vox to national prominence while 1. It fueled the stratospheric rise of billion- dollar companies like Zynga and Living. Social—only to suck the helium from them a year or two later with a few adjustments to its code, leaving behind empty- pocketed investors and laid- off workers.

Facebook’s news feed algorithm can be tweaked to make us happy or sad; it can expose us to new and challenging ideas or insulate us in ideological bubbles. And yet, for all its power, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is surprisingly inelegant, maddeningly mercurial, and stubbornly opaque. It remains as likely as not to serve us posts we find trivial, irritating, misleading, or just plain boring. And Facebook knows it. Over the past several months, the social network has been running a test in which it shows some users the top post in their news feed alongside one other, lower- ranked post, asking them to pick the one they’d prefer to read. The result? The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes,” Facebook acknowledges, declining to get more specific. When they don’t match up, the company says, that points to “an area for improvement.”“Sometimes” isn’t the success rate you might expect for such a vaunted and feared bit of code.

The news feed algorithm’s outsize influence has given rise to a strand of criticism that treats it as if it possessed a mind of its own—as if it were some runic form of intelligence, loosed on the world to pursue ends beyond the ken of human understanding. At a time when Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants increasingly filter our choices and guide our decisions through machine- learning software, when tech titans like Elon Musk and scientific laureates like Stephen Hawking are warning of the existential threat posed by A. I., the word itself—algorithm—has begun to take on an eerie affect. Watch Confessions Of An Innocent Man HIGH Quality Definitons.

Algorithms, in the popular imagination, are mysterious, powerful entities that stand for all the ways technology and modernity both serve our every desire and threaten the values we hold dear. A panel of news feed testers has become Facebook’s equivalent of the Nielsen family. The reality of Facebook’s algorithm is somewhat less fantastical, but no less fascinating.

R Question (6+ Answers Questions ONLY) Answer Answer Answer Answer Answer Answer Answer; 1: Tell Me The Age When Boys Stop Playing With Stuffed Animals (Numeric Only). Whether capturing breaking news, a baby’s first steps or rising to a friend’s challenge for charity, video is one of the most engaging and immersive ways to tell. Gizmodo has a livestream on our Facebook. NASA is streaming the solar eclipse on its Facebook page. CNN is also livestreaming on Facebook. Twitter. Twitter is. [Dr. Emmett Brown is doubting Marty McFly's story about that he is from the future] Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, future boy, who's President of the United States.

I had a rare chance recently to spend time with Facebook’s news feed team at their Menlo Park, California, headquarters and see what it actually looks like when they make one of those infamous, market- moving “tweaks” to the algorithm—why they do it, how they do it, and how they decide whether it worked. A glimpse into its inner workings sheds light not only on the mechanisms of Facebook’s news feed, but on the limitations of machine learning, the pitfalls of data- driven decision making, and the moves Facebook is increasingly making to collect and address feedback from individual human users, including a growing panel of testers that are becoming Facebook’s equivalent of the Nielsen family. Facebook’s algorithm, I learned, isn’t flawed because of some glitch in the system. It’s flawed because, unlike the perfectly realized, sentient algorithms of our sci- fi fever dreams, the intelligence behind Facebook’s software is fundamentally human. Humans decide what data goes into it, what it can do with that data, and what they want to come out the other end. When the algorithm errs, humans are to blame. Watch Jacob`S Ladder Online Facebook here.

When it evolves, it’s because a bunch of humans read a bunch of spreadsheets, held a bunch of meetings, ran a bunch of tests, and decided to make it better. And if it does keep getting better? That’ll be because another group of humans keeps telling them about all the ways it’s falling short: us. When I arrive at Facebook’s sprawling, Frank Gehry–designed office in Menlo Park, I’m met by a lanky 3. Watch Saved! Online Hollywoodreporter.

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Tom Alison is director of engineering for the news feed; he’s in charge of the humans who are in charge of the algorithm. Alison steers me through a maze of cubicles and open minikitchens toward a small conference room, where he promises to demystify the Facebook algorithm’s true nature. On the way there, I realize I need to use the bathroom and ask for directions. An involuntary grimace crosses his face before he apologizes, smiles, and says, “I’ll walk you there.” At first I think it’s because he doesn’t want me to get lost. But when I emerge from the bathroom, he’s still standing right outside, and it occurs to me that he’s not allowed to leave me unattended. The Facebook office in Menlo Park, California. Photo by Christophe Wu/Facebook.

For the same reason—Facebook’s fierce protection of trade secrets—Alison cannot tell me much about the actual code that composes the news feed algorithm. He can, however, tell me what it does, and why—and why it’s always changing. He starts, as engineers often do, at the whiteboard.“When you study computer science, one of the first algorithms you learn is a sorting algorithm,” Alison says. He scribbles a list of positive integers in dry erase: 4, 1, 3, 2, 5. The simple task at hand: devise an algorithm to sort these numbers into ascending order. Human beings know how to do this,” Alison says.

We just kind of do it in our heads.”Computers, however, must be told precisely how. That requires an algorithm: a set of concrete instructions by which a given problem may be solved.

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