Making curation algorithms apparent: a case study of ‘Instawareness’ as a means to heighten awareness and understanding of Instagram's algorithm

ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing prevalence of curation algorithms on everyday social network sites (SNSs), they often are imperceptible and difficult to become knowledgeable about since little insight in the actual working of these algorithms is given. To address this, we developed an online interface as a visual feedback tool to decrease the ignorance about the Instagram curation algorithm, named ‘Instawareness’ (https://instawareness.ugent.be/). As such, the goal of this article is to validate the actual effectiveness of Instawareness and to demonstrate how people can be made aware of the Instagram curation algorithm using a quasi-experiment. Validating the actual effectiveness of Instawareness allowed us to connect additional findings about the influence of awareness and understanding of Instagram’s curation algorithm to our primary validated findings about achieving such awareness. These show that it is not cognitive understanding about Instagram’s algorithms but solely awareness about them that appears to be sufficient for people to indicate increased critical concerns towards SNSs. Furthermore, Instawareness proved to be efficient in increasing cognitive media literacy (CML) and in indirectly stimulating critical concerns towards SNSs.

KEYWORDS:

• Algorithm awareness
• media literacy
• social network sites
• Instagram

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thibault Fouquaert

Thibault Fouquaert obtained a bachelor in applied computer sciences at College University Ghent, after which he graduated as a master’s in communication sciences New Media & Society at Ghent University. This way, he wants to put his technical knowledge and skills to use in the field of social sciences. Thibault is currently following a postgraduate master’s in business economics at Ghent University and teaches web programming at Ghent College University. After this, he intends to combine this knowledge by doing research in the field of media industries, media economics and digitalisation [email: [email protected]].

Peter Mechant

Peter Mechant holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from Ghent University (2012). Until mid-2005 Peter worked as an ICT-project coordinator for an e-business firm. He studied several scripting and programming languages during and after this period. After joining mict, Peter has been mainly working on a variety of research projects related to e-gov (open and linked data), smart cities, social software and online communities. As senior researcher, he is involved in managing projects and project proposals on a European, national as well as regional level and he helps expanding and enhancing mict’s offering towards the scientific research community. Peter currently works as a doctoral assistant at the Department of Communication Studies where he is, amongst others, lecturer-in-charge for the course Encyclopedia of Communication Sciences and promotor of bachelor and master theses [email: [email protected]].