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.
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.
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
Pirate Software has the only shorts on YT worth watching imho
My favourite thing about his shorts is trying to guess if it’s going to be a wholesome one or one where either him or his chat bestow cursed knowledge onto each other
The only political thing I watch is Behind the Bastards and the algorithm keeps trying to get me to watch right wing shit. I installed a third party channel blocker and open suspicious channels in private tabs and it still serves me right wing chuds complaining about being suppressed by “woke google”. I would troll the comments section if it wasn’t for the fact that that counts as “engagement”.
I despite all my lgbt content got served some 1 mil subs catholic lady saying how she loves red pill, pro life or something like this. Such women always have this crazy light in the eyes, it creeps me out.
You can feel that she is in some kind of state of altered reality, like someone on drugs. High on something.
It has either gotten better or just improved its suggestions for me over time. I basically never get right wing content anymore. There’s plenty of garbage, but it’s stupid garbage rather than dangerous garbage.
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.”
A simple way to do it is to stop considering them as platform providers but editors and it shou’d be done in my opinion because by their recommandation systems, they are making editing choices.
I have to hard disagree on this outmost pessimistic outlook because it reads like any regulation we already have is pointless so we can just scrap regulations and rules altogether across the board. That’s similar to the neoliberalist rethoric I loathe to see pushed into my recommendations and it’s simply not true. In reality we do see that regulations sometimes do the trick. It’s just that they likely won’t regulate them as harsh as I proposed, but that’s a different argument. Regulation as an instrument does work.