Eli Pariser calls on tech platforms like Google and Facebook to redesign their algorithms with public responsibility in mind and to give users more agency over what they see online.

More specifically, he urges them to:

  • Build civic responsibility into their ranking and recommendation algorithms, not optimize only for clicks, relevance, or engagement.
  • Ensure their systems expose people to a wider range of viewpoints instead of locking them in “filter bubbles” that narrow perspectives and undermine civic discourse.
  • Make their curation systems more transparent , so people can understand the basic rules that decide what shows up in their feeds and what is filtered out.
  • Give users meaningful control over their feeds and filters, rather than having invisible algorithmic editing shape their information environment without their knowledge.

In his well-known talk, Pariser summarizes this as a call for the “new gatekeepers” (companies like Google and Facebook) to encode a sense of public life and civic duty into their code, make their filtering processes more transparent, and let users help shape their own information ecosystems.