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A series of short articles, with videos and browser addons "investigating algorithmic injustice and the formulas that influence our lives."

If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber - a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means some people make incorrect predictions about political events. They threaten our democratic conversation, splitting up the common ground of assumption and fact that is needed for diverse people to talk to each other. A few tools are mentioned in the post that help you see "the other side" of a story - you might like to play with them, e.g. http://politecho.org "is a browser extension that shows the political biases of your friends and Facebook newsfeed"

Not a day goes by without a flurry of data-driven memes passing through my Facebook news feed, sailing by on my Twitter stream or landing as alerts in my email inbox that cite what appear to be reputable datasets and using them to offer surprising conclusions, typically wrapped up in a mesmerizing infographic. Yet, when I pick any of these memes at random and delve into it, I find that it is the rare meme indeed that stands up to statistical scrutiny.

Aleks Krotoski explores why science is being drowned out by Snake Oil online, and how the balance can be shifted to keep desperate people from being exploited. But despite there being more scientific information online than ever, in the modern day the power of the internet has completely flipped. Verified science and medicine are crowded out by a plethora of misinformation and snake oil salesmen. From the relatively harmless quackery such as infrared light treatments or 'wellness' focused diets, to conspiracy theories around vaccinations that are influencing political policy, and have resulted in outbreaks of dangerous, preventable diseases across the world - what is happening online is having a tangible impact across the globe. Aleks Krotoski explores how the infrastructure of the internet allows medical misinformation to thrive, finds out how people can be drawn into communities centred around medical misinformation and conspiracy theory, and how both scientists and every day internet users can redress the balance online.

Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives - and our futures. The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online. The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launch. It may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.

Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation's series on the science of free will.

We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads. The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting. This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online. Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.