How Facebook’s revolutionary News Feed kicked off the age of algorithms

It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives. In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had stopped growing. People weren’t joining, and existing users weren’t spending more time on the site. The solution co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users’ homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them – in particular, new posts their Facebook friends had added. Up to then, users had to actively check their friends’ profiles to see what they were up to. Now, this information would automatically be sent to your homepage. With it, a new world of algorithmic interaction was born. It might seem quaint now, but for many Facebook users at the time, these changes felt like a violation of their privacy and trust. If you were to change your relationship status from “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated”, for example, this could now be broadcast to all of your online friends. The News Feed caused the
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