Reverse Engineering: Practice

In this subsection I detail five case studies of journalists using a reverse-engineering approach to understand algorithms. I’ll draw on my experience analyzing censorship and defamation in search-engine autosuggest algorithms, as well as conversations I had with Michael Keller (The Daily Beast), Scott Klein (ProPublica), Jeremy Singer-Vine (Wall Street Journal), and Rob Barry (Wall Street Journal), all of whom have had direct experience working on or editing algorithmic accountability stories. The goal is to provide a summary of these efforts, to connect them to the theoretical component above, and to note the challenges encountered in employing the method in practice.