Asher Kessler writes: “In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier, the company had stopped growing. The solution cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users’ homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them. Twenty years later, we can understand this development as one of the most significant socio-technical changes of the entire digital revolution. It ushered in an age where algorithmic systems structured how people interacted, consumed news, and conducted political activity.”