The Algorithm Chose a President

On November 8, 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election, and somewhere in the wreckage of every prediction model and pundit's credibility, a new understanding emerged: the internet had become the most powerful political infrastructure in American history, and nobody who built it had planned for this. Facebook's News Feed algorithm, designed to maximize engagement, had spent the cycle surfacing content that generated the strongest emotional reactions — which meant outrage, conspiracy, and partisan fury traveled faster and further than anything resembling nuance. Macedonian teenagers were running fake news websites for ad revenue. Cambridge Analytica was harvesting user data at industrial scale. Twitter had become the de facto public square, except the square had no rules and the loudest voices won by default. The platforms had spent a decade insisting they were neutral infrastructure — pipes, not publishers. The 2016 election made that fiction impossible to maintain. The internet had been built to connect people. It turned out that connected people, fed algorithmically curated information bubbles, could be radicalized at a speed that democratic institutions were not designed to withstand. Silicon Valley had moved fast and broken things. The thing it broke was the shared reality that democracy requires to function.