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.
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.