Appearing as a guest in the premiere episode of “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman,” Barack Obama, the former U.S. president, offered an example from the Arab Spring era to demonstrate how algorithms play a potentially harmful part in driving the content we’re served by social media and search engines, leaving some consumers particularly susceptible to fake news and propaganda or, ar minimum, a less than comprehensive views of current events:

”At a certain point,” he added, “you just live in a bubble”...

This is from an interview in 2018, but he mentioned algorithms again in his speech last night.