Every day, a handful of algorithms decide what billions of people read, watch and believe โ and not one of those people knows how, or why, or has any say in it.
We don't accept that. Babil exists because we believe the relationship has to be flipped: a recommendation algorithm should be a tool in your hands, not a lens someone else holds in front of your eyes.
A transparent algorithm is possible. We built one.
For years, the industry's answer has been the same: "it's too complex to explain", "users don't actually want control", "the black box is the product". We think that's a convenient story.
Babil is our small, stubborn proof that it isn't true. On this platform you can see what the algorithm infers about you. You can tune its weights. You can keep several AlgoProfiles side by side โ one for news, one for fun, one for whatever you want โ and switch between them in a click. You can turn the whole thing off.
None of this is magic. It's a few thousand lines of code written by a few people on a small budget. If we can do it, a company valued in the hundreds of billions can do it too.
Tech giants won't do this on their own.
Let's be honest about why they don't. Opacity is not a technical constraint โ it's a business model. An algorithm you can't inspect is an algorithm you can't challenge. An algorithm you can't challenge can be optimised for whatever the company needs it to optimise for: time-on-site, ad revenue, engagement at any cost. User control is a direct threat to that model, so user control is not going to arrive on its own.
It has to be demanded. And, in the end, it has to be legislated.
Our objective: make algorithmic transparency the law.
Building Babil is one half of the job. The other half is advocacy: making the case, publicly and to lawmakers, that the right to understand and adjust the algorithms curating our public conversation should be written into regulation โ the way the right to access your personal data already is.
Concretely, that means:
- Publishing Babil's algorithm code so that "we built a working version" is not just a claim.
- Writing and contributing to briefs, public consultations and policy proposals on algorithmic transparency and platform regulation.
- Talking to civil servants, journalists, researchers and anyone else willing to listen about why user-controllable algorithms should be the rule โ and what that could look like in practice.
- Keeping the Babil algorithm itself small, honest and easy to audit โ because an example that doesn't live by its own principles isn't worth following.
Help us fight.
Babil is run by a very small team. We don't sell ads, we don't sell your data, and we don't plan to. If you think this fight is worth having, the best thing you can do is donate: even a few euros a month keeps the platform online and buys us time to keep working on Babil.
Curious about the people behind Babil? About us โ