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We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Well it also looks at stuff like the other devices connected from the same IP, other devices near where you connect from and then based on this also hones the served content.

So if the author/some colleague or even the neighbors are red pilled/MGTOW/Chriso-Fachists etc this also makes sense. Possibly even their research into these subjects slanted the results. Let alone what happens if they spun up a VM at a cloud farm and used it from there.

I'm in no way surprised that "social" media corps serve up vile shit for profit ik just not convinced by some random let's see what happens.

Edit: I'd be for a law that required targeted ads to have a small "why you see this" and if you click it the company is required to show you the selection criteria that caused this ad to be served to you in an easy to understand format. (Leaving out all the irrelevant criteria).. ie.

You where selected by the following criteria:

region: europe
gender: male
interests: Games, Lemmy, politics

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It's also probably looking at scroll speed. So if the people conducting the experiment tended to linger longer examining content they disliked, that could result in getting more of it.

Would need to see a more detailed explanation of the methodology. Ideally the scrolling was done in an automated way, at a consistent speed.