Media Literacy Practice Test

The main idea here is understanding how a platform decides what to show you based on your clicks and engagement. That mechanism is called an algorithm. An algorithm is a set of rules or a modeling process that analyzes signals from your behavior—like what you click, how long you look at something, what you like or share—and uses them to rank and filter content in your feed. The goal is to predict what will keep you interested and engaged, so the platform surfaces content it thinks you’ll interact with next. This is different from the bandwagon effect, which is a social psychology idea about people adopting views because many others do; and from the echo chamber, which describes the outcome of repeated exposure to similar viewpoints rather than the selection rules themselves; and from disinformation, which is false information spread intentionally. So, the term that best fits is algorithm.