Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). 404 André Lemos and David Domingo DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v16n3.2020.1390 JOURNALISM AND ALGORITHMS INTRODUCTION ANDRÉ LEMOS Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador – Bahia, Brazil ORCID: 0000-0001-9291-6494 DAVID DOMINGO Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels – Belgium ORCID: 0000-0003-4859-7486 DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v16n3.2020.1390 It is no exaggeration to say that contemporary society is immersed in a broad process of platformization (Van Dijck et al., 2018), datafication (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013; Van Dijck, 2014) and algorithmic performativity (Cheney-Lippod, 2017; Lupton, 2016; Dourish, 2016; Gillespie, 2010; Finn, 2017). These intertwined trends of platformization, datafication and algorithmic performativity (PDAP) (Lemos, 2020) correspond to the new phase of capitalism, a data or surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015), whose dynamics are linked to five large companies (GAFAM – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) that control the digital economy through their platforms. The platformization of society acts by the daily irradiation of data collection from digital platforms, about the smallest personal movements (like a message, posting a photo, writing a comment, buying something, visiting somewhere, etc.), generating inferences about behaviors, inducing actions. This basic data collection process is datafication, a different process from digitization, which simply consists of turning analog objects into digital ones. Platformization and datafication are expressions of the performance of algorithms. They analyze large amounts of data and propose solutions to the most diverse problems. Their codes are kept as an industrial secret and are therefore opaque and dominated by an “epistocracy” (Danaher, 2016), generating a sense of neutrality, efficiency and rationality. If platformization and datafication are the forms of digital action in contemporary society, algorithms are the fuel that drives them.