Free Republic

One of the most ubiquitous tropes in politics is members of Congress finding ways to blame society’s ills on something new that they don’t understand. Rock music, violence in video games, and profanity on television all had their turn as the societal scapegoat in recent decades. The most recent flavor of moral panic is social media — in particular, lawmakers have begun to cast their suspicious gaze upon the mysterious algorithm as a potential public nuisance in need of their regulation. The story goes that the algorithms being used to rank what content is displayed on users’ social media feeds...