What do we know about algorithmic literacy? The status quo and a research agenda for a growing field

Abstract

The increasing role of algorithms shaping our use of communication technology—particularly on social media—comes with a growth of empirical research attempting to assess how literate users are regarding these algorithms. This rapidly emerging field is marked by great diversity in terms of how it theorizes and measures our understanding of algorithms, due, in part, to the opaque “black box” nature of the algorithms themselves. In this review article, we summarize the state of knowledge on algorithmic literacy, including its definitions, development, measurement, and current theorizing on human–algorithm interaction. Drawing on this existing work, we propose an agenda including four different directions that future research could focus on: (1) balancing users’ expectations of algorithmic literacy with developers’ responsibility for algorithmic transparency, (2) methods for engaging users in increasing their literacy, (3) further developing the affective and behavioral facets of literacy, and (4) addressing the new algorithmic divide.

You Can (Not) Say What You Want: Using Algospeak to Contest and Evade Algorithmic Content Moderation on TikTok

“…Users largely value TikTok for its uncannily accurate, yet, compared to other platforms, highly responsive recommendation algorithm (Taylor & Choi, 2022), which is subject to common folk theories about how and why TikTok selects, pushes, and restricts videos from appearing on "for you" pages (Karizat et al, 2021;Klug et al, 2021). Such algorithmic literacy among users is an important factor to predict user behavior and to make sense of user attitudes (Oeldorf-Hirsch & Neubaum, 2021), for example, to better understand how users make practical use of algorithms (Cotter, 2022), or how their experiences shape their perceptions of digital realities (Liao & Tyson, 2021). Algorithmic literacy likewise informs TikTok users' understandings of and experiences with the platform's content moderation system, which quite often relies on user reporting of content (Zeng & Kaye, 2022) but is mainly composed of human content moderators and artificial intelligence (AI), which involves automated decision-making and machine learning but is often colloquially called algorithms or bots (Grandinetti, 2021).…”