Algorithmic Mirror is an interactive visualization tool that simulates the hidden profiling practices of social media platforms. Developed in collaboration with Oxford's Synthetic Society Lab and Oxford’s Child-Centred AI Lab, and built on the Latent Lab platform, the tool experiments with large language model–based sentence embeddings to reimagine how online activity might be categorized and interpreted.
Rather than offering dashboards of quantitative metrics or metadata counts, Algorithmic Mirror generates an interactive, explorable landscape: a speculative “profile” of young people’s digital traces. The project does not uncover actual platform models but instead constructs possible mirrors of algorithmic judgment—artificial reflections that expose how identity could be abstracted and rearranged through data.
By turning opaque inferences into interactive spatial metaphors, the tool invites reflection on how children’s online footprints may be silently transformed into profiles, and how inhabiting such mirrors might alter one’s sense of self.