Regarding the word "algorithm"
It's a regular word, with a specific meaning. It refers to a series of instructions, including conditional steps. Your calculator adding two numbers is following an addition algorithm. Sorting entries in a table is using a sorting algorithm. An algorithm can do nothing. A recipe (being a series of steps) is an algorithm (although one that's less rigorous than in mathematics or computers).
But a lot in the media you hear "algorithm" refer to "social media blackbox recommendation systems". Now, these are algorithms, no doubt! But the use of the term in this way is a bit confusing for those of us who regularly need to refer to both concepts.
Consequently, I distinguish the two in the following way:
lower-case a algorithms are procedures, like I laid out above. A system to determine if a word is an English palindrome is an algorithm. It's a technical term, and has minimal political significance.
Upper-case A Algorithms refer to black-box systems maintained by corporations as part of their customer retention and monopolization systems. Discussing these is generally much more political than technical.
But seriously though, "algorithms" are not inherently bad, please be specific when in a domain where both meanings could apply. It's like the word "inception", it doesn't mean "thing embedded within a thing" (that's recursion or maybe a strange loop). Inception just means the beginning of something, like "the inception of the research project was when Billy realized that his sunflower wasn't turning to face the sun".
