You Hate the Algorithm. That’s the Point.

Discussing voting machines, capitalism, democracy, and the evil social media algorithms.

Everyone hates social media algorithms. They’re manipulative. They’re divisive. They surface the worst of humanity — rage, grief, mockery, political combat. They make us feel terrible.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: they’re just counting votes.

And if you believe in capitalism, or democracy, or any system where human preferences aggregate into outcomes — you have to reckon with what the algorithm is actually showing us.

Three Voting Machines

Think about it this way:

Capitalism is a voting machine. Every dollar you spend is a vote for what you find valuable, beautiful, worthwhile. The market aggregates those votes and allocates resources accordingly. Companies that get more votes survive. Companies that don’t, die.

Democracy is a voting machine. Every election is an aggregation of preferences about who should lead, what policies should prevail, what future we want. The system tallies votes and produces outcomes.

Social media algorithms are voting machines. Every click, every like, every share, every second of watch time is a vote for what you find interesting, entertaining, engaging. The algorithm aggregates those votes and surfaces content accordingly.

In all three systems, the mechanism is the same: human preferences go in, outcomes come out.

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The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even When We Wish They Did)

Here’s what the research shows:

A Yale study published in Science Advances found that expressing moral outrage online gets more likes and shares than other types of content — and that these rewards teach people to be angrier over time. The algorithm isn’t making us angry. It’s revealing that anger is what we reward.

Researchers at Harvard Business School analyzed 140,000 tweets from 44 news organizations and found that negativity was 15% more prevalent than positivity — and negative tweets generated more engagement. This wasn’t manipulation. This was measurement.

A 2025 study in PNAS Nexus confirmed what many suspected: engagement-based algorithms amplify emotionally charged, hostile content. But here’s the kicker — they do this because that’s what users engage with. The algorithm is optimizing for what we actually do, not what we say we want.

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm drives 70% of what people watch on the platform. That’s not YouTube deciding what you should see. That’s YouTube predicting — with remarkable accuracy — what you will watch based on what billions of people like you have watched before.

“But the Algorithm Is Rigged!”

Here’s where it gets interesting.

This argument only holds if the algorithm is pure — meaning it’s a genuine aggregation of human preferences without interference.

Some platforms manipulate their algorithms for various reasons: suppressing certain political content during elections, promoting “authoritative sources” over user-generated content, restricting content that might cause “harm” (however defined), or boosting content that serves business interests over user interests.

When platforms do this, the algorithm stops being a voting machine. It becomes something else — an editor, a censor, a curator with an agenda.

And you can make a case that this intervention is good. Maybe we shouldn’t let pure democracy decide what content gets amplified. Maybe humans are bad at knowing what’s good for them. Maybe some content is so harmful that it should be suppressed regardless of demand.

But if you make that argument, you’re not defending democracy. You’re defending something else — a managed system where the votes get counted, but then someone decides which votes should really count.

The Uncomfortable Question

Here’s where I want to push you:

If you believe in capitalism — the idea that markets, for all their flaws, generally allocate resources toward what people actually value — then you have to believe in algorithms that surface content people actually engage with.

If you believe in democracy — the idea that aggregated human preferences, for all their flaws, are a better guide than the judgments of elites — then you have to accept that social media algorithms are doing exactly what democracy does: reflecting the will of the people.

The content that performs best on social media — outrage, conflict, mockery, tribal signaling — isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of human nature that we’ve been seeing in markets and elections for centuries. Social media didn’t create this. It just made it visible.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with:

Maybe the reason you hate the algorithm isn’t because it’s manipulating you. Maybe it’s because it’s showing you something true about human nature — including your own — that you’d rather not see.

Or maybe — and this is the more radical possibility — you don’t actually believe in voting machines. Maybe you think people don’t have their own best interests at heart. Maybe you think some preferences should count more than others. Maybe you think the masses need to be protected from themselves.

That’s a legitimate position. Lots of smart people throughout history have held it. But it’s not democracy. And it’s not capitalism. It’s something else.

What is it?

I’ll let you decide.

Sources: Yale University (Science Advances), Harvard Business School, PNAS Nexus, Tulane University, Smithsonian Magazine, YouTube/Google