"When my son was born… I decided to post a photo of him every day on Instagram," Geoffrey A. Fowler writes in his The Washington Post corner, "Within weeks, Instagram began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children. My baby album was becoming a nightmare machine."

Fowler came across all kinds of sensitive media—from deformed body parts of children to babies in hospitals fighting for their lives. Sometimes posted by parents looking out for support, sometimes spam accounts. This problem with algorithm is faced by parents worldwide who are on the platform just to share their joy. While Instagram and other social media algorithms have a positive impact on our daily lives, they are frequently inaccessible and opaque to the ordinary individual.

The issue about the application of algorithmic forces revolves around the balance between complete transparency and confidentiality. These computational approaches, moreover, lack any form of public assessment. There is an epistemological conundrum: we have no idea who knows how all these algorithms function.

Why did those photos keep showing up? Haugen, a former Facebook product manager explains, "I am sure when you run into one of the shocking photos, you're not intending to spend time on that photo, but you pause. And the algorithm takes note of that longer duration.”

It's called 'dwell time'. Dwell time refers to the overall amount of time a user spent hovering over a specific article or piece of content in their feed, and it covers both engaged and non-engaged users. The longer a user's screen is stuck on a post, the longer the post's dwell time will be.

According to a Pew Research study published in 2019, 74% of Americans are unaware that Facebook stores information on their interests and characteristics. "For all its marvel and comfort, know-how too usually fails us. These days, I’ve been exploring concepts about how we are able to make it higher. Excessive on my listing of calls for: We the customers want transparency about how algorithms work — and the flexibility to press reset after they’re not serving us," Geoffrey writes.