We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny
We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny
Result of Guardian Australia experiment aligns with research showing social media automatically delivers troubling content to young men, largely without oversight
How do the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram affect what you see in your news feed? To find out, Guardian Australia unleashed them on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address.
Three months later, without any input, they were riddled with sexist and misogynistic content.
Initially Facebook served up jokes from The Office and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, Daily Mail and Ladbible. A day later it began showing Star Wars memes and gym or “dudebro”-style content.
By day three, “trad Catholic”-type memes began appearing and the feed veered into more sexist content.
Three months later, The Office, Star Wars, and now The Boys memes continue to punctuate the feed, now interspersed with highly sexist and misogynistic images that have have appeared in the feed without any input from the user.
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I was explaining this to my daughter not long ago when she told me she kept getting recommended videos about something that offended her (I can't remember what, but something Republicans would be in favor of) on YouTube that the algorithm doesn't care whether or not you agree with the videos. It only cares about whether or not you'll watch them. And if you're willing to hate-watch, which many people are, you'll get served the same videos as the people who enjoy it.
And, of course, the more controversial the better because you'll get a whole lot of both groups. So if you post something sexist and hateful, you'll get a huge number of redpill viewers and the like and then all the other people who go to that post to argue with them. Which means the algorithm learns that those are the best things to push on new accounts too.
You engauge with it, you must like it.
That’s just not true. Many people engage with things they don’t like because of education and curiosity.
For instance, I don’t like your comment but I still engaged with it to point out that you’re wrong. I like Lemmy, in general, though.
I took that comment to be summarizing the platform’s perspective, rather than their own. I think it’s common sense that people will watch/engage with things they don’t like, but the algorithms don’t care about how you feel or why you watched something; they see engagement and they give you more of that thing to drive more engagement. As far as the unfeeling numbers go, engagement might as well be liking; they don’t need to distinguish a difference.
Sure, I saw that side of it too as I work in marketing but I took the comment at face value since it wasn’t specific about that intent. I’m happy to retract my comment if that’s what they meant.
That is what I meant - engage to facebook means you like it and want to see more.
As someone who used to sit around at a TV station for hours waiting for news to happen so I could go shoot it, I can tell you for a fact that you don't have to like a show to watch it. You just have to be bored and it's in front of you.
That said, I did find out that American Ninja Warrior was amusing.
Howard Stern's entire career was famously based on that fact.
You engaged with this post, you must like it.
No, they think "You engage with it, that makes us money."