>The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at there most basic sense, promote what is popular.
Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.
That just proves my point. the_donald had to find an exploit and resort to spamming in order to get the algorithm to push them onto the front page. They couldn't get there on the basis of, you know, actually being popular because a large number of people want to read them.
It proves that reddit admins didn't like right wing shit posting and were willing to rewrite the algo to deal with it. Which is completely the opposite of the point you were making that these algos are somehow neutral.
It proves that reddit admins take steps to deal with people who abuse the site with spam, which is what one would expect of any forum administrator for any spam content.
If their content was so compelling, why did they have to spam it? Why wouldn't it just attract users organically the way other content does?
You were the one who stated that /r/the_donald spammed Reddit to reach the front page. Are you changing your story and now saying they reached the front page organically? Are you confused about what spamming is?
If there really were a large number of people genuinely interested in the_donald, it would have reached the front page without spamming. The reddit algorithm is probably also biased against posts trying to sell penis enlargement pills. Do you think that is also oppressive?
Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.