In an era where digital communication shapes societal discourse, understanding the nuances of modes of communication on social media platforms is an important aspect of Library and Information Science. This is because vast numbers of people now find their news and information chiefly through social media and because the role of libraries is changing from custodians of knowledge to champions of media and information literacy as part of the neoliberal responsibilisation movement. As the coded languages and means of expression used on various platforms—intended to evade censorship or moderation and collectively referred to as “algospeak”—encroach into the mainstream, this research seeks to establish the current state of academic knowledge in the field. A semi-systematic meta-narrative literature review of several relevant databases forms the basis of the study. This approach was chosen to achieve the most thorough, transparent and replicable sweep of the relevant literature which an initial informal search had revealed to be spread across a variety of disciplines. It also provides the basis for a preliminary study investigating the feasibility of using the open-source text mining software package Orange to identify algospeak “in the wild."