In the modern, hyperconnected world, wars are not fought on land, in the air, or on the sea. They are embodied in the hidden realm of algorithmic procedures; instead, the code that determines what the billions of the population see, read, and think daily. This competition is a summary of the term “Algorithm War,” which refers to a struggle over the control of digital attention and opinions, as well as the systems of recommendations that mediate them.

Washington to Beijing, New Delhi to Brussels, all governments are increasingly becoming conscious of the way algorithms are ceasing to be neutral infrastructural mechanisms and are becoming instruments of power. They can even impact the electoral process, mobilize protest movements, and even alter the direction of conflict.

The war in algorithms is not fought in the traditional conflictual, kinetic interaction, but rather through the stakeholders competing for control of data, platforms, and the software that determines the visibility of information. Institutionalized engines that operate on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram process how users behave, and they present content that is engineered to keep a user to a compulsive engagement longer and longer, with a screen.

However, the search for prolonged engagement comes with a price. It has been studied that algorithms are biased to advance hyper-outrageous or emotionally-charged content artificially, as the outraged and the fear-provoking are shown to have a greater click-through rate. These dynamics are also divisive of a society, contribute to the spread of misinformation, and manipulate people’s moods. The Cambridge Analytica case is a premonition of this, in which the data obtained about the user through Facebook could be utilized to create psychographic data, which could be utilized to create highly-targeted political adverts to shape electorates in the United States, India, and elsewhere.

The algorithm war may be best summed up by the TikTok deal that is now polishing US-China technology relations. TikTok is another successful digital media platform that belongs to the Chinese technological firm, ByteDance. It has more than a billion users all around the........

© Paradigm Shift