Algorithm Literacy: Social Media Algorithm

awareness of Senior High School Student in MNHS

RESEARCH PLAN
1. Research Problem:
Social media, also known as networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, and Instagram, is one
component of the Internet that has developed at an exponential rate. Although the Internet and
social media provide several benefits for our society, such as the ability to communicate with millions
of people all over the globe and create new career possibilities, many people fail to consider the
negative repercussions of these technologies. Most young students are addicted to social media, but
how aware are they of how the algorithm works? Simply engaging, such as checking someone's
comments thread, has an enormous influence on the person's feed.
2. Rationale:
By merely biasing its feed to its content, the internet may truly affect a person. Mass media exposure
of Filipinos aged 10 to 30 enrolled in 2019 Typically, Filipinos aged 10 to 30 enrolled in 2019 used the
internet to access social media. Cookies, or the history of data stored in a web browser, are part of
the algorithm, and each site you visit might alter your decision-making process.

3. Significance:
The student’s perspective can be influenced by just algorithm being broken or biased. Being able to
orient and know about how participants will answer the question will help gather more people
interest to educate themselves about this kind of things

4. Objective:
The objective of this study is to learn from the students about how they perceived the algorithm and
how knowledgeable they are with it.
5. Method and Design: Respondents:
Qualitative The students from MNHS

Sample Size:
15

Sampling Technique:
Convenience sampling

Background of Study
Science and technology advancements, particularly the creation of instant messaging software and mobile networks, have made
communication easier. People can communicate with others by sharing and publishing their experiences. The data has finally
attained autonomous creation, and the big data age has begun. The tremendous social function of social networks has drawn
many dedicated users as one of the main applications in the big data age. By analyzing data in social networks, a great deal of
information about users may be gleaned, which can be used to give more personal services to consumers, such as web page or
product recommendations or the prediction of new links. The topic of predicting prospective linkages is one of these applications
that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years (Tian J, Xue L, Cai H, 2020). This circumstance has raised some worries about how
these algorithms and the firms that build them may have a substantial impact on people's decisions. Indeed, several businesses
have been accused of meddling in democratic elections, especially Facebook and Google, and a growing number of voices are
advocating for stricter AI restrictions to defend democracy. In response to this problem, several institutional actions are being
formed; nevertheless, many researchers and journalists are suspicious of these warnings and initiatives. The scientific literature on
algorithmic advice acceptance, with a few exceptions, finds a general resistance to algorithmic counsel in society, meaning that
most individuals prefer human expert advice to algorithmic advice.

Most children learn how to use the internet at an early age, which means they are surrounded by algorithms as they grow up. It's
critical to be algorithm literate in this environment: to grasp what algorithms are and how they might give a limited perspective of
the world. Kids should be taught how to recognize when they aren't receiving the complete story (Jeunesse, ccunesco and unesco).
According to the research section of the statisticians, the internet became extensively available in the Philippines in 1994, resulting
in the country's steadily increasing internet knowledgeable consumers. By 2020, the country's internet users will have increased to
79.7 million, accounting for more than half of the entire population. The digital population is primarily composed of those aged 16
and up. Senior high school students are generally 16–19 years old, which means they may have had the most exposure to the
digital world. Although algorithms are thought to be the decision-making sections of code, it's no wonder that there's a fascination
with how they influence organizational, institutional, commercial, and governmental decision-making.

It's possible that algorithms are influencing how individuals are treated and assessed. Alternatively, consider how algorithms
influence outcomes and opportunities. This is to consider how algorithmic systems are incorporated into organizational structures,
and how they affect decisions or become integrated into the choices made, and how those choices become a part of people's life.
Algorithmic sorting, ranking, and prediction politics. This includes the algorithm's ability to establish, sustain, or solidify standards
and perceptions of abnormality (see Crandall, 2010, p. 83). What is encountered, as well as how algorithms prioritize and make
apparent, can be shaped by algorithms. People's life are shaped by algorithmic systems' predictions, which shape what they know,
who they know, what they discover, and what they experience. Algorithms' strength is in their capacity to make decisions,
categorize, sort, order, and rank data. That is, to determine what is important and what should be the most noticeable. This is
about how algorithms may restrict or cut off external influences, keeping individuals exposed to the same people, events, news,
culture, and so on all of the time. It is proposed that while considering how algorithms categorize and order, we should consider
how they repeat patterns and hence limit interactions to those that fit current patterns. "Sophisticated searchers were not
particularly aware of how the search interface and algorithms influenced their process.

Internet upvote and downvote as a way to reduce fake news or algorithm bias. Voters should understand what they're voting for,
which is the veracity of the information rather than whether or not they like it. If many of the votes for an answer come from
people who just like it or the writer, the system's main benefit is devalued, and suspected this is what frequently happens,
especially when seen on several occasions, a factually incorrect but well written answer receives a large number of votes both the
number of upvotes and downvotes that any answer has received, allowing us to determine its quality based on the balance of the
two" (Ian Sawyer 2016). However, the question is not just whether AI can influence humans through explicit suggestion and
persuasion, but also if AI can impact human decisions through more subtle persuasion and manipulation approaches. Indeed,
several research demonstrate that AI may leverage human heuristics and biases to subtly sway people's judgments. A well-known
example is a study on voting behavior in the United States during the 2010 congressional election, which included a sample of 61
million Facebook users. The findings revealed that Facebook messages affected millions of people's political self-expression and
voting behavior. These findings were later repeated during the 2012 U.S. Election to the Presidency Interestingly, effective
messages were not simply provided as algorithmic suggestions, but used "social proof," encouraging Facebook users to vote by
imitation by presenting the photographs of their friends who indicated they had previously voted. Thus, instead of employing an
explicit algorithm suggestion, the presenting style took use of a well-known human heuristic (i.e., the inclination to copy the
conduct of the majority and of friends). Several additional covert preference manipulations have also been pushed by using well-
known heuristics and biases. Manipulation of the order in which various political candidates appear in Google search results, for
example, or boosting the familiarity of particular political candidates to induce greater trust are techniques that employ cognitive
biases and so diminish critical thinking and alerting processes. As a result, they have been proven to (subtly) draw more votes to
their preferred candidates. Furthermore, these subtle persuasion methods might allow the algorithm's impact on behavior go
unrecognized, and individuals may frequently believe that they made their decision freely, even if they are voting against their own
interests. Whether an AI program might control people's voting choices by making explicit suggestions, or whether individuals
would refuse to accept the algorithm's recommendations in order to demonstrate their independence and freedom. Although
voting attitudes might be influenced by a variety of factors such as physical appearance, personality and value compatibility,
political objectives, and so on, for the purpose of simplicity, we opted to utilize simply the images of the probable candidates. The
physical appearance of a candidate is a known characteristic that has a considerable impact on voting decisions (Agudo U, Matute
H, 2021).

Relevant Literature
As per the research paper entitled "Information Literacy in The Age of Algorithms" noted thay most students recognized that as
information has become ubiquitous, the hidden levers that personalize results and nudge us toward selected information often
camouflage complexity behind the appearance of simplicity and efficiency. Moreover, many, though not all, were aware that data-
driven algorithms, if unexamined and unchallenged, could threaten representative democracy and the cultivation of informed and
engaged communities (Alison J, Fister B,Macmillan M. 2020). In the study entitled "The Influence of Algorithms on Political and
Dating Decisions" concluded that a more sophisticated algorithm, such as those with which people interact in their daily life
through the Internet, can surely exert a much stronger influence.

In both concluded researches can validate that there can be a negative effect if those who use it are not knowledgeable of how
algorithm can be effective in changing someone's decision ((Agudo U, Matute H, 2021).

Synthesis
How should we understand algorithm and what can we do about it. How will it affect our life or everyone’s thinking, which
should’ve little get an attention? There are many, widely varying answers to these questions. Is it really that important? Though
anyone can just ignore, but that just the way it is. Some people just think they do know everything about the web. What many fail
to realize is that it not just one person can be affected to how manipulative is it but everyone is. Failing to realize these leads many,
when trying to educate someone about the algorithm issue, the answer to how it works it always end up forgetting about it and do
nothing toward contributing to the further understanding of the issue. Rather, they just surf in the social media without thinking
about it. This is why we rarely come across someone who stance on this issue.

After looking for the similar written about this topic online I’ve able to identify many that have same conclusion about how
algorithm can be a bad thing, first is “Code-Dependent: Pros and Cons of the Algorithm Age” by Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson.
This 86-page research that uses the method of survey to know how people understand the algorithm. It was focused on the 7
major theme of algorithm era that is categorize in 3 types, inevitable about algorithm, concerns and social challenges. The most
common words that were show negative bias for the topic from the respondents is that people lack of critical thinking or
knowledge of how it computer algorithm work. The lack of critical thinking among the people embracing these tools is shocking
and can lead to some horrible civil liberties outcomes, I don’t think it’s possible to assign an overall ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to the use of
algorithms (Cohn C, n.d). While many of these respondents estimate that the impact of algorithms will be negative, most of these
experts assume that no matter what drawbacks may develop algorithm-based decision-making will continue to expand in influence
and impact. Still In the end most answer was positive and looking forward on the future of computer algorithm and think that it
could get better in long run. The second one is “The influence of algorithms on political and dating decisions” by Ujué Agudo and
Helena Matute. Many experiments were done. They showed that in the political context, a fictitious algorithm was able to
influence the willingness to vote for some candidates through explicit recommendations or whether, by contrast, people would
refuse to follow the algorithm’s recommendations, in an attempt to show their independence and freedom., but at the same time
a covert algorithm did not influence voting preferences by exploiting familiarity bias using the mere-exposure effect. The
experiment that was done by the researcher may not had consequences for the respondents so it was noted that potentially it
could not explain the result.

For my perspective the algorithm can really affect our decision making in many ways. Some point we should just let it since there’s
also algorithm in real life that also do affect our decisions but also if we think that were in a wrong part of it maybe we should try
to also gain knowledge about how it works and be able to see the other side and not be bias to what we think its right because
algorithm is influential that could let you think everything you do is just normal or the right thing to do so.