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..."
We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks to check what was being served up.
This is a critical flaw in the studies methodology. 'loiter time' is a metric used by algorithms to serve up new content, if the researchers where checking each post for signs of misogyny, then they were probably skipping by totally innocucus stuff whilst paying attention to misogyny. This (being the only feedback given) will have shown the researchers what they wanted to see.
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.
It'd be good to know the actual ratios, given this was a guardian study there's no reason to withhold data, nor a secondary source I can go and find the data. It's possible that Facebook is simply serving up the entire spectrum of posts proportionately to their activity on the internet, or even favouring anti-sexist posts that are just not noticed/mentioned by the guardian.
Does anyone genuinely believe banning this sorta stuff is going to "end violence against women and children in one generation"?
The John Doe profiles were set up in April as generic 24-year-old males
Does the fact that they only used dummy male accounts and didn't bother to find out what women are subjected to represent the authors' own misogyny? Perhaps The Guardian should look at cleaning it's own house up before finding dirt on others'.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Instagram, while the explore page has filled with scantily-clad women, the feed is largely innocuous, mostly recommending Melbourne-related content and foodie influencers.
Nicholas Carah, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, said the experiment showed how “baked into the model” serving up such content to young men is on Facebook.
She praises the federal government’s Stop it at the Start campaign, which includes an “Algorithm of Disrespect” interactive depicting what a young man may encounter on social media.
The federal government has also funded a $3.5m three-year trial to counteract the harmful impacts of social media messaging targeting young men and boys.
The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, says combatting misogynistic attitudes and behaviour in the online and offline world will help achieve the national plan to end violence against women and children in one generation.
“Around 25% of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and condone violence against women - this is shocking,” she says.
The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What's this got to do with the UK exactly?
If anyone has an issue with the appropriateness of an article for a community feel free to report it and let the Mods decide. There's no need to make a big deal about it.
I'm now locking discussion here as it has become uncivil and, ironically, off-topic.