Result of Guardian Australia experiment aligns with research showing social media automatically delivers troubling content to young men, largely without oversight

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.

  • schnurritoEnglish
    4·
    4 个月前

    Yes, so much this! I always believed that in the mobile internet era it would still be like this except we would be able to access it everywhere. Instead all we have is “platforms”. 🙁😡

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
      3·
      4 个月前

      whats weird to me is that the kids today seem to require an ‘app’ per website . this requirement of their own choosing seems to lock them into whatever platform

      as an old person familiar with browsers since lynx, its baffling

      • schnurritoEnglish
        2·
        4 个月前

        Apps aren’t even that bad an idea, by themselves. Transmitting only the actual information and not the entire UI every time is a good idea, even more so if the apps are FOSS and the services have open APIs (which admittedly is the exception).

        I grew up with IRC and of course everyone seriously using it used a standalone IRC client, not a browser chat interface.

        • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
          2·
          4 个月前

          but the difference is between using an irc client to connect to any irc server and using ICQ to connect only to that one service.

          we purposefully updated browsers to enable dynamic content for exactly the reason you propose…efficiency. i cant count how many sites converted to ajaxy-goodness so we dont have to redraw the whole ui. we spent 20 years building ‘mobile-aware’ websites so devices with different screens could handle the same site without problem.

          i still get from the children, ‘is there an app for your site?’ yep; firefox.