What you don’t know about Internet algorithms is hurting you. (And you probably don’t know very much!)

All the fomenting drama and discussion has sparked a new field of academic research called “algorithm auditing”: probing Internet algorithms from the outside, in order to figure out how they tick and what may be wrong with them. A manifesto on the algorithm audit, published by the Open Technology Institute last October, envisioned an Internet where platforms would come with warnings about their algorithms and whom those algorithms serve.