I think it's really important that we hold these companies to account and make sure they understand that the consequences of deploying technology don't just come with the PR of innovation, but that the public and government are going to look deeply at these algorithms or malgorithms and try to make sense of them. That doesn't mean you put the algorithms into the world and the 200 data scientists and computer programmers who understand them can look at them. It means that we have to invest deeply in transparency and auditing systems that allow for us to really understand what it means to serve information online and why they prefer different kinds of information at different times.
What we know about virality online is that novel and outrageous things go furthest and fastest. That tends to be conspiracies—