“…I begin this article by outlining the contextual framework of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on intimacy and the socio-economic aspects of social media platforms. Then, I will introduce a theoretical framework for understanding the underlying motives of individuals’ choices, whether to connect with (Madianou and Miller, 2013) or disconnect from digital media (Bucher, 2020; Natale and Treré, 2020), anthropological approach to intimacy (Sehlikoglu, 2015; Sehlikoglu and Zengin, 2015), mediation of intimacy (Attwood et al, 2017), and critical approach to algorithms (Bucher, 2017; Douglas-Jones et al, 2021; Lomborg and Kapsch, 2020; Seaver, 2017; Ytre-Arne and Moe, 2021). I will then move to a delineation of the methodology I employed for conducting this research, describing the process of reaching out to the interviewees and explaining why the research focuses on the interviewees’ understandings of algorithms.…”