Postcolonial digital reflexivity: algorithmic coloniality and the Filipino self in everyday Facebook talk about ChatGPT

Generative AI is often framed as a technical breakthrough, yet its social meanings are unevenly understood beyond Western contexts. This study examines how Filipino Facebook users make sense of ChatGPT through everyday posts and comment threads, showing how AI becomes entangled with local ideas of effort, authorship, and identity. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis, the paper identifies four recurring patterns: the continued valorization of hard work as a marker of authenticity, the emergence of digital shame as users humorously and indirectly manage uneasy reliance on AI, the reframing of ChatGPT as diskarte or practical resourcefulness, and the circulation of satirical content that highlights mismatches in AI-generated representations. Rather than expressing a unified stance, these discourses reveal an ongoing negotiation in which AI is alternately questioned, normalized, and reworked through familiar cultural logics. The article introduces postcolonial digital reflexivity to describe how users interpret and position themselves within algorithmic systems without fully rejecting them, showing how the meanings of automation are locally produced, contested, and affectively lived in the Global South.