It’s time to insist on social algorithm transparency - opinion

The world feels like it’s come unmoored. Democratic institutions are wobbling, alliances are fracturing, and the basic fabric of shared reality is being shredded. The chaos we’re witnessing not just a coincidence of bad actors and bad luck. It is enabled and driven by social media by people prepared to harm society for a hefty profit.

Limiting the damage has proven difficult. Though preventing radicalization and hatred and protecting young people should be bipartisan imperatives, the MAGA right has turned doing nothing into a crusade for “free speech” and part of its disastrous war on the “elites” – which another way for saying disdain for expertise and indifference to education.

But in a twist no one predicted, two smallish nations have stepped forward with a sense of urgency that the rest of the democratic world has largely lacked: Romania and Australia. In recent weeks they decided to act — one to fight foreign disinformation and defend its electoral process, the other to protect its children from algorithmic addiction and despair.

The urgency of this has been given a prominent platform by the harrowing Netflix series Adolescence, which brutally portrays how a vulnerable teenage boy is driven to commit  murder.

This entire catastrophe is a grand parable of the human condition. After all, social media was once hailed quite reasonably as a force for democratization and connection, elevating the discourse and enabling human on a global scale. And some of that has happened.

On these platforms all opinions — no matter how absurd, hateful, or detached from evidence — get a seat at the table. In this warped digital agora, expert consensus is drowned out by loud amateurs, conspiracy theorists, and well-funded propagandists.

The platforms insist they merely reflect what users want to see and say, but that’s a dodge. In reality, algorithms shape what billions of people receive — and those algorithms are optimized not for the public interest but for engagement, which usually requires rage, fear, or tribal affirmation. Engagement begets income for the owners, so they have made these platforms the primary delivery system for disinformation, polarization, and mistrust.

So this is not about freedom of speech but about what to amplify.

This is a wonderful landscape for populist conmen – why this why they love social media and hate journalism, with its standards of truth.  Autocrats want you to just believe their lies (“I am not robbing you blind”), while the news media has accuracy standards that make it the enemy of a new information order built on viral nonsense.

So what we have here is the ultimate war on truth.

When platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube boost divisive lies over cautious truths, they’re not protecting expression but choosing profits over social cohesion.

These platforms aren’t just passively hosting content; they are actively deciding what spreads and what dies in the algorithmic void. That’s an editorial decision, whether they admit it or not.

And yet they’re shielded from the responsibilities of publishers. They rake in revenue from advertising attached to outrageous content, then shrug when called to account.

This problem has grown exponentially since Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X. In the name of "free speech," Musk re-platformed digital rabble-rousers as the site quickly devolved into a premier hub for conspiracy theories and unfiltered nonsense.

Musk’s own tweets — often bizarre, frequently conspiratorial, and increasingly aligned with the global populist project — are naturally boosted by the very algorithm he controls.

Countries pushing back against social media consequences

Which brings us to Romania, an unlikely ground zero in the global information war. After massive Russian social media interference in an election last November, Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the result. The national communications regulator ANCOM, acting under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), moved to force platforms to explain and justify moderation practices. TikTok was temporarily suspended.

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took on a different aspect of the tech dystopia: the manipulation of children. Following a spate of suicides tied to online bullying and abuse, his government passed a law banning social media access for those under 16.

This is because social media's pervasive influence has been linked to significant declines in self-esteem, body image, and reading habits among youth. Platforms like TikTok have been associated with trends that promote unhealthy eating behaviors and unrealistic body standards.

The constant exposure to idealized images on social media can result in lower self-esteem and toxic sentiment. This has been long understood among young women, who face both impossible beauty standards and the message that how they look is all that matters.

But by now the nefarious effect is also evidence in boys and young men, who can neither attain the masculinity levels celebrated online nor the beautiful women – AI-generated or otherwise – that dominate the algorithm; the result – and this is the subject in Adolescence – is misery, a rise in incel groups angrily glorifying misogyny, a chasm between the sexes, and worse.

Furthermore, the rise of digital media consumption has correlated with a decline in reading habits and comprehension skills in children, as the preference for quick, easily digestible content diminishes the appeal of longer, more complex texts. So young people are perplexed by news articles – a good way to remain ignorant.

Australia’s law fines platforms up to $31 million for failing to enforce age limits.  Critics scoffed that it would be impossible to implement. But Australia already banned mobile phones in schools, leading to a 63% drop in bullying-related incidents.

Romania and Australia have understood a larger truth: Left unregulated, these platforms will not protect the public interest but build us a dystopia just to make a few more pesos. The question is whether others will follow.

In the US, the Senate is now debating the Kids Off Social Media Act. Utah has already passed laws requiring age verification on app stores. This should be one of the main coming policy discussions for responsible people across the political spectrum. And it is ordinary people who should demand it.

The starting point must be transparency. Platforms should be required to reveal how their algorithms rank content — and regulators should be empowered to penalize systems that systematically amplify lies, incite violence, or destabilize democracies.

No one argues that companies have the right to dump toxic sludge into rivers in the name of freedom. Why do we allow social platforms to poison the information ecosystem?

This will require persuasion, legislative will and international coordination. But it’s necessary. If we want a functioning public square, we need rules. If we want democracy to survive, we need truth to compete on a level playing field. Authoritarians, kleptocrats, and demagogues will fight it: they thrive where facts are optional.

We need to stop letting the algorithms drive us mad. End the tyranny of the feed.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Columbia University and has worked with several tech startups. Follow him at danperry.substack.com