Parents’ understandings of social media algorithms in children’s lives in England: Misunderstandings, parked understandings, transactional understandings and proactive understandings amidst datafication

Abstract

In this paper, I ask how parents understand and make sense of their children’s relationships with social media algorithms. Drawing upon 30 think-aloud interviews with parents raising children aged 0 to 18 in England, in this paper, I pay attention to parents’ understandings of and consequent approaches to platform algorithms in relation to their children’s lives. I locate this work within user-centric research on people’s understandings of algorithms, and research about parents’ perspectives on data and datafication in relation to sharenting. Through my data, I draw out four modes–misunderstandings, parked understandings, transactional understandings and pro-active understandings. I suggest that parents’ often flawed understandings of their children’s myriad interfaces with algorithms deserve scrutiny not through a lens of blame or individualised parental (ir) responsibility but within cross-cutting contexts of parenting cultures and families’ diverse contextual resources and restraints. I conclude by highlighting attention to parents’ approaches to algorithms in children’s lives as critical to parents’ data and algorithm literacies.