Personalized algorithms may quietly sabotage how people learn, nudging them into narrow tunnels of information even when they start with zero prior knowledge. In the study, participants using ...

This article was co-authored with Emma Myer, a student at Washington and Lee University who studies Cognitive/Behavioral Science and Strategic Communication. In today’s digital age, social media has ...

You check your credit score before applying for an apartment. Your fitness watch tells you whether you slept well enough. A workplace dashboard measures your productivity. Parents can buy devices that ...

There's an iconic scene at the end of the 1985 film "Back to the Future" when Doc Brown returns from 2015 to warn Marty McFly and his future wife, Jennifer, that their future children have "problems." ...

People often blame social media algorithms that prioritize extreme content for increasing political polarization, but this effect has been difficult to prove. Only the platform owners have access to ...

Social media algorithms determine what billions of users see daily, yet most creators barely scratch the surface of how they operate. Platforms prioritize content ranking using engagement metrics, ...

Young people with fewer financial resources, especially boys, are the most exposed to advertising about how to make easy money. So confirms a pioneering study by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), which ...

Landlords could no longer rely on rent-pricing software to quietly track each other's moves and push rents higher using confidential data, under a settlement between RealPage Inc. and federal ...

Media personalities and online influencers who sow social division for a living, blame the rise of assassination culture on Antifa and MAGA. Meanwhile, tech CEOs gin up fears of an AI apocalypse. But ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Social media companies and their respective algorithms have repeatedly been accused of fueling political polarization by promoting divisive content on their platforms. Now, two U.S. Senators have ...