Understand your Social Media Algorithm

Social media is an unavoidbale part of modern life. Even if we don't use it ourselves, almost everyone we know does. It affects how we socialise, work, spend out free time and much, much more.

But despite how prevalent it is, most of us still don't fully understand how it works or how it affects us as individuals and communities. This free public workshop will help you to make sense of one of the most important parts of today's social media platforms... algorihtms.

Algorithms (sometimes known as "recommender systems") are the machines that decide what content appears in our social media feeds. On ond hand, they can help us to discover funny, interesting or inspiring new things. But on the other hand, they can also expose us to content that is harmful, manipulative or unture.

This workshop will get right to the heart of this extremely important issue and explore questions like:

• Why do we get shown the content we do?
• How can scrolling affect our mental health?
• How can it affect our friends, families and communities?
• How can we make our algorithms safer and healtheir?

Viral Wise is an independent, youth-led educational initiative helping people and communities across Ireland to make sense of social media algorithms.