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.
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.
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:
Source (actual fucking source, as in an article written Aug 13, 2013, instead of your personal experience from the last decade): https://buffer.com/resources/understanding-facebook-news-feed-algorithm/
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.
Fine, I’m a middle aged fuck who thinks the late 2000s is 10 years ago. So sue me for moving the goalposts to 15-17 years ago, around the time Obama was getting elected. Yes engagement was a thing but fuck no it was not a constant deluge of far right propaganda.
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.