The Best Way to Understand an Algorithm? Help Test One

The Algorithm is an interactive educational experience that simulates the algorithmic feeds of social media applications like TikTok and Instagram Reels. It allows users to test a fictional company's social media algorithm by scrolling, liking, and sharing content as they go. As they do so, they witness what happens under the hood in real time as the system becomes personalized to them.

The project was created by Lujain Ibrahim and Alia ElKattan, who are PhD students at the University of Oxford researching sociotechnical approaches to evaluating and governing AI systems, their impact, and risks to society. With the support of a previous Mozilla Creative Media Award, they co-built Survival of the Best Fit, an online educational game on AI bias.

The Algorithm was selected for the IDFA Doc Lab Forum 2023 and is part of the 2023 CMA cohort unpacking how AI is - and should be - designed. The project aims to demystify what recommender systems entail and empower users to examine where their agency starts and ends by interrogating concepts like personalization, engagement optimization, content variety, transparency, and algorithmic choice.

Mozilla Creative Media Awards uplift art and media to communicate complex technical concepts, deepening society's understanding of technology and demanding accountability from those who build and deploy it. Past awardees have created interactive experiences, games, videos, films, and more, and projects have gone on to show at a variety of regional and global film festivals such as IDFA, Tribeca, TIFF, Cannes, and museums like Tate Modern, MoMA, HKW.