This paper explores playful engagement with algorithmic systems among members of the North Atlantic Fella Organisation (NAFO). NAFO are an international social movement that emerged on Twitter in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We use a combination of textual analysis and semi-structured scroll-back interviews, to understand how NAFO members make sense of the algorithmic environment of Twitter, and how their understanding of algorithms affects their daily participation in a social movement. We examine the community’s practices, or allegorithms, through the prism of playful activism.

Our findings reveal that NAFO understand Twitter’s algorithm as both an instrumental and an antagonistic entity. Their self-professed status as an algorithmic actor reclaims power in a fragmented and increasingly hostile environment of Twitter. Instead of seeing algorithms as adversarial or omnipotent, NAFO members engage in playful vernacular practices to reclaim their agency over the information ecosystem.

NAFO do not succeed in fully understanding or rewriting the “rules of the game”, but achieve their objective of propagating civic ideas to ever-increasing international audiences. With the growing interest in harms that arise from online humour and memes, our paper highlights a contrasting and complementary aspect of online humour - the civic nature of playful practices in digitally mediated collectives.

This paper tackles the under-explored issue of users’ perception of uncertainty surrounding the algorithmic systems of social media platforms. Drawing on 93 in-depth interviews with ordinary users, our study makes two primary arguments.

First, that perceptions of uncertainty, instead of being resolved by “imaginaries” and “folk theories”, may evolve into a distinct form of conspiratorial epistemology. Some interviewees’ ideas resembled typical conspiracy theories, replete with intricate plots and numerous characters -- such as that platforms colluded with politicians to meticulously manipulate the algorithmic amplification of certain contents. Others exhibited vaguer conspiratorial sentiments, often stemming from a sense of unease about the exact goals of platforms’ constant monitoring.

Second, these conspiratorial viewpoints seem to be associated with the materiality of social media algorithms. Many of the ideas interviewees expressed could be linked to evidence generated by the algorithmic systems themselves, such as the types of posts and ideologies seemingly privileged by platforms, or the oddly precise targeting of interviewees with messages by advertisers, the police, or governmental bodies. On this view, algorithmic systems’ materiality is seen as occupying a paradoxical position of conspicuous invisibility. That is, in continuously generating apparent evidence of their existence without ever disclosing the rationale behind these processes, algorithms intensified suspicions about their true nature.

The paper suggests novel ways in which trust in platforms can be undermined by their perceived association with broader structures of power. Regardless of their accuracy, these ideas may shape users’ attitudes towards tech organisations, deserving more attention from researchers and policymakers.

The discourse on women's online entrepreneurship predominantly centres on social media influencers, neglecting a significant population of self-employed women entrepreneurs who leverage social media for business without fitting the influencer mould. This study addresses this gap by examining how self-employed women in the UK attempt to make sense of social media algorithms to obtain visibility and generate income.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 28 self-employed women across various sectors, this research uncovers a prevailing reliance on intuition and instinct, termed as "vibes," in algorithmic sense-making. Amidst the opacity and complexity of algorithms, these women prioritize the "feeling" of platforms, algorithms, and their entrepreneurial selves over strategic research or algorithmic theories.

Rather than investing heavily, or indeed at all, in ‘playing the visibility game’ (Cotter 2019), self-employed women often deprioritise algorithmic sense-making due to competing work responsibilities. For them, social media updates are but one aspect of their business operations. Rather than invest time into practices such as visibility engineering (Cotter 2019), self-employed women in a variety of roles and industries rely on vibes to guide their social media practices, often choosing to ignore algorithms altogether.

This research underscores the importance of recognising and understanding the diverse approaches to algorithmic sense-making among self-employed women. By shedding light on their experiences and perspectives, this study enriches current understandings of online entrepreneurial pursuits and highlights the need for more inclusive research in the field of digital entrepreneurship.

Algorithms provide individuals insight on possible selves to explore and feedback on performances of the self. Prior scholarship examining how the information audiences are exposed to leads to either formation or shifts in their identity. Using TikTok as an example, Cotter et al. (2022) proposed algorithmic conspirituality, the notion that social media content that is ‘meant for you’ is served up to you at exactly the time you need it. Our work explored how this genre of content might shape identity work on TikTok. To examine this, we conducted focus groups and interviews with TikTok users who were familiar with content framed as meant for them on the platform. Our findings outline three major themes - reinforcing identities, possible selves, and self-reflection - and discusses their connection to identity work based on content that is curated or meant for them.