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We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny

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.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

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.

bluGill ,

You engauge with it, you must like it.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

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.

WindyRebel ,

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.

fern ,

You engaged with this post, you must like it.

Skates ,

Holy shit, so you mean you made accounts posing as men and got content targeted mostly at men, presumably based on what other men have interacted with in the past? Say it ain’t so. Why would the algorithm do this?

theacharnian , (edited )
@theacharnian@lemmy.ca avatar

Holy shit, were you born yesterday?

Social media was not a stew of shit a decade ago. The algorithm recommending this crap is not a natural phenomenon, it’s a practice that the companies running things have come to adopt. They could adopt a different practice. Source: was a man on social media a decade ago and was not constantly bombarded with toxic shit.

apfelwoiSchoppen ,
@apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world avatar

I quit Facebook a decade ago because it was toxic shit but I get your point. There was a moment in the past where it was good and connected you to distant people in your life and little else.

bluGill ,

I'm able to keep facebook okay, but only by constant blocking all from. I wish I could turn off all shared content. The good stuff on facebook is people I personally know but see rarely - but that only takes a few minutes to catch up on and they need me to doomscroll for hours to make money.

Skates , (edited )

Holy shit, were you born yesterday?

Social media was not a stew of shit a decade ago.

Source: was a man on social media a decade ago and was not constantly bombarded with toxic shit.

Lol imagine being on social media for 10 years and still complaining about the algorithm.

Here’s a post from 11 years ago explaining how you were being targeted and how engagement was measured back then:

Facebook has a hierarchy of post types, since some types garner more engagement than others. Photos and videos take top priority. Links are second, and plain text status updates are at the bottom end. Weight doesn’t end there, though.

Interaction from other users can also affect this. For instance, comments are more weighty than likes, but both affect the overall weight of the post. So a text-based status update with 50 likes and 10 comments will be more likely to show up in the Newsfeed than a photo with no engagement at all.

Source (actual fucking source, as in an article written Aug 13, 2013, instead of your personal experience from the last decade): buffer.com/…/understanding-facebook-news-feed-alg…

So, in those 10 years you’ve been on social media (congrats on the milestone btw, maybe you’ll get a clue about the fucking world soon) what they’ve been doing has not changed, it’s merely been perfected. But yeah, sit there and tell me all about how your rose-tinted glasses are ackshually great and don’t distort your view, and you’re not just a mindless cunt that’s been zucking the zuck’s dick for the last 10 years, scrolling through shitty posts meant to make you click them. “things were better back in the day” lol gtfo dumbass it’s always been the same, it just took you 10 years to notice.

What an actual waste of my time.

Carrolade ,

Uh … sorting posts into video, pic and text only and then by votes and comments is not what we’re talking about when we say algorithm. Though yes, I guess that technically is a very simple algorithm.

Skates ,

It’s the same algorithm. It has the same purpose and the same result. It has simply been updated and improved. And it most likely still relies on certain markers that can measure how much a post will be engaged with and who will do it, except those markers are now less primitive and harder for us to define.

We’re arguing semantics. This has always been the purpose of a social network: to keep you addicted to it. To keep you interacting with it. They don’t make money if you’re not there to click their ads, to look at their sponsored videos, to be marketed towards. Did they do it as well 10 years ago as they do it today? No, of course not. But you were still being targeted with posts that would “do well” with your gender, your age group, your location etc. They haven’t changed one little bit of their business model.

So what are we talking about here? Some guy discovered 10 years down the road that a company wants you to keep using their website/service/app/whatever, but he thinks 10 years ago that company was - what? More scrupulous? More genuine?

Nah, man. It was always the same. They just got better at their jobs. And - fuck me, it sounds like they were pretty good at their jobs even 10 years ago: they managed to keep Joe Slow scrolling for an entire decade.

Carrolade ,

If the algorithm was “updated and improved” then it is not the same algorithm.

Badeendje , (edited )
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

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
Carrolade ,

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.

ID411 ,

The algorithm serves the most engaging content.

De_Narm ,

That’s what happens if you only care about engagement. Chauvinism of any kind is liked by a certain amount of people and despised by the rest of us - both positions drive engagement.

CosmoNova ,

I mean it‘s the exact same if you visit Youtube without an account or cookies. The Internet has become a swamp of right wing and neoliberal populism that kicks down on minorities and people with lower than average income in general. The insane amount of completely made up rage bait stories that you get recommended is just unfathomable.

I think it‘s gotten to a point where it needs to be regulated how many lies a site can throw at you at the same time and I don‘t say this lightly. I just see no other way to get this mind eating populist machine under control.

BlackLaZoR ,
@BlackLaZoR@kbin.run avatar

right wing and neoliberal populism

Or maybe you just live in a swamp of left wing and radical socialism?

HK65 ,

That’s just the Netherlands.

  • wealth taxes ✓
  • insanely good infrastructure ✓
  • reasonable worker’s rights ✓
  • an actual swamp ✓
BlackLaZoR ,
@BlackLaZoR@kbin.run avatar

still capitalist ✓

Username02 ,

Then how is them live in a swamp of left wing and radical socialism?

BlackLaZoR ,
@BlackLaZoR@kbin.run avatar

He doesn't. He makes false claims.

pyre ,

own goal

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

That can change.

Ismay ,

Youtube shorts are the worst. I am transgender so my historic is really not right wing

30mins on shorts and I end up in Shapiro’s Dreamland. It’s a nightmare

Barbarian ,
@Barbarian@sh.itjust.works avatar

Pirate Software has the only shorts on YT worth watching imho

lemmyng ,
@lemmyng@lemmy.ca avatar

Regulation won’t work, because regulation moves slowly, and these companies find workarounds fast. And as long as the cost of breaking the rule is less than the benefits of doing so, it’ll be “just the cost of doing business.”

BlastboomStrice ,
@BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz avatar

I have a ~3year old fb account because I have to use messenger. I don’t use FB almost at all (I even sparingly accept friend requests) and have turned off ~anything that provides targeted content (I live in EU).

Since about last year (or possibly even before), my feed is about 35% Ikaria ads (a Greek island, I’m from Greece), 10% porn, 10% sexist-misogynistic stuff, 15% sexist-misogynistic porn, 15% christian stuff and the rest random stuff.

At least this might confirm that turning off targeted content works…🤷

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I use Facebook because my relatives are spread out across the world and that’s the way I know to stay in touch and also my brother, who is neurodivergent, mostly likes to communicate to the family as a whole that way and I want to be able to stay in touch with him too. On top of that, I’m stuck in a town I hate with no friends here and some old friends from my hometown are there so I can talk to them.

Anyway, ever since my brother started talking about how he was taking various hallucinogenic substances and calling himself a psychonaut (he’s almost 60, he got into it very late), most of the ads I see are for shroom gummies, ketamine and boner pills. I’ve done my “psychonaut” stuff back when I was in my teens and twenties. I’m not interested in the former two and the latter is, thankfully, not necessary yet.

The funny thing was that maybe 4 or 5 years ago, I kept getting shown an ad for a wooden hurdy-gurdy kit. Like the medieval instrument. I have no idea why. I have never expressed an interest in playing the hurdy-gurdy, listening to the hurdy-gurdy or building anything out of a wooden kit. It became a joke with me and my friends for a while.

autotldr Bot ,

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!

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