This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable.

I'm Jacob Weisberg.

Typically, if a car crashes because there's, say, a faulty drive train, we can point to the engineering

and say there's a problem with this system.

With these adaptive systems, they're reacting and learning and responding to human society and human behavior.

And we're still developing the scientific tools to understand what it means to have those feedback loops.

Algorithms are adaptive systems. They're pieces of computer code that shape many aspects of our digital lives.

They're closely guarded trade secrets

and powerful tools.

And they're regularly blamed

for amplifying our cultural and political divisions.

We often hear technologists say

we couldn't have known.

And the idea that they haven't turned those lenses on questions impacting the common good,

it's a scandal if they haven't asked the question,

it's a scandal if they've asked it and they're not telling us what they found.

This is the fourth chapter in our solvable series examining solutions for America's polarization problem.

Today, we're talking about social media algorithms and how to deal with them.

You can think of social media companies as fancy restaurants.

The cooks behind the most successful ones often don't want to reveal their recipes, but customers have a right to know what they're eating. It turns

out we've been down this road before. The good housekeeping labs started just around the turn

...