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.

  • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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    3 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.

    • localme@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Yep, it’s called dwell time and it is 100% one of the metrics used by the algorithms that decide what content to serve up.