Not even in a meme way, I genuinely think people have a concerning complex about math.
"Math trauma" aligns more with general academic trauma. The only difference is that the current education model greatly prioritises arithmetic manipulation more than anything.
People's rage about mathematical models of art and language becomes weird when you kind of understand that mathematical models are also extensively used in fields like physics and engineering. As the name already suggests, a mathematical model only acts a model of the real thing, not a one-to-one recreation of the original. (Also, if someone responds to this with GenAI, generative algorithms don't necessarily model its corpus.) There is an argument (and a cleaner one) to be made that there are key assumptions made about what aspects of the source is trivial and can be discarded, some of which may be problematic. Those are very intriguing, but the general layman reaction does read as though mathematically modelling something "intrinsically human" is in a way, a means of dehumanising ourselves.
"The algorithm"? Complete misnomer. Etymologynerd kind of touches on why it's wrong but in a trivial way (it's actually generally multiple algorithms but that's a blackbox to us). Ultimately, it misses out that an algorithm is, in essence, just a finite sequence of rules of mathematical operation in order to solve some specific problem/perform some computation. Algorithms don't "do" anything more significant than that. What makes social media algorithms dangerous is the fact it exists in a sociotechnical system; it interacts with the real world (which already have certain biases and systemic disparities) and were developed for a reason in our current economic system (under capitalism, they were developed to make shareholders wealthier). Assigning blame to some "algorithm" ignores a) how much of life can be meaningfully modelled using algorithms and b) that these social forces exist independently of the tech and math involved.
I do think that the culprit is that the current academic system is harshly abusive about math, but it's true of any subject. English can be equally traumatising in the developing world where proficiency in English acts as a gatekeeping method and yardstick against which many working class students are measured and subsequently beaten with. I remember an education in English literature used to be something deeply prized in Global Southern communities as a means of showing that they are "cultured" and "learned" (in Western culture) despite their backgrounds.
There's also just the fact that STEM subjects have become a strange proxy for rationalism and objective (or generally, "masculine" and "hegemonically dominant") thought, more so than the arts and the humanities, which are often perceived much more subjective. The way it is taught is that they are very "rules-based". We also see this in "follow the science", "show me the numbers", even though anyone who has ever worked in those fields know how contentious things can get. There's a lot of discussion on why STEM in particular has become this almost imposing figure, and how its (largely arbitrary) separation from other subjects are due to more complicated factors in the development of education in the modern world. Unfortunately, I can't speak too much on that.
On a personal note, I think math is great and an incredibly beautiful field of study. I don't really think people generally "hate" math. I think have a completely vaild negative reaction to the overwhelming harm that many powerful figures enact by utilising a little bit of math. Math just become the mascot for it.
That being said, we really don't need to use mathematical terms to describe evil things because all that does is make people more afraid of math, which is never good because becoming more proficient in math and science helps us navigate a world where people often lie to us by citing "math" and papers with poor methodology. I think, in the same way that humanities/arts people correctly think that STEM students could learn a little more about the humanities and arts, humanities and arts students could learn to be a little less scared of STEM, especially math
