“THE ALGORITHM IS YOUR MOM”: PLAYFUL ALGORITHMIC AGENCY IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC FELLA ORGANISATION

Resumen

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.