Humble tools of divine intervention – The misunderstood role of algorithms in public opinion formation

Social media companies and their owners offer these tools to control epistemic frameworks across different communities and networks. We must assume that they use them for their own benefit. This means that we need to somehow reframe ‘The Algorithm’ from being a free-floating, data- and profit-driven, but otherwise inert agent, into a tool which is used by its masters and their clients to control our symbolic spaces. The interplay, in contrast to what Gandini, Keeling and Reviglio are saying, is not between the ‘algorithmic systems and users’, but between those who design, operate and use these algorithms, and those who are controlled by them.