Mum of a toddler and an infant, Rijula, drew my attention to the sorts of conversations around infant feeding and the introduction of solids to small children, that appear to be going on in her own Facebook news feed as we spoke while she browsed through her social media timeline. She explained to me that there was a higher chance of her encountering posts, websites, and videos on natural parenting and baby-led methods of eating and weaning. Rijula said that she knows that, previously, when she searched Google for parenting advice, her previous search data had possibly ‘gone somewhere’ to shape things she sees on her news feeds and timelines on other platforms. She says that ‘they’ see what kind of searches she has done in the past. She says, that because she has done a lot of breastfeeding searches, ‘they’ will assume that she might go more towards ‘the baby-led weaning and more of the breastfeeding route’. Like the #InstaDads in Campana et al (2020), Rijula and many other parents I spoke to, display an awareness of the need to cooperate and live with (Kennedy, 2018) platform algorithms, but there is not much offered to clarify who ‘they’ are, in Rijula's and many others’ understanding.

As Rader and Gray (2015) identify, algorithmic curation which organises, preselects, and presents information to us across platforms, on a variety of news feeds and timelines, generate cross cutting loops of feedback, which, they argue, make all users gatekeepers for each other. Rader and Gray note astutely in their work on user experiences of algorithmically curated timelines (2015), ‘feedback loops have the potential to affect behaviour at both the individual and system level’ (p 181). Here, as Bucher theorises, algorithmic curation seeks to deliver algorithmic ‘right time’, where the right kind of content appears at just the right moment for just the right person – at the intersection of platform infrastructures, business models, and commercial players and user cultures and interactions. Indeed, as Bandy and Diakopoulos (2023) suggest, algorithms sit inside broader loops cutting across realms of social contexts, individual cognition, commercial contexts, platform architectures and so on (see also, Etter and Albu, 2021).