Are the algorithms making men more sexist?
Broken Web
In an eyebrow-raising experiment that shows the toxicity of modern social media, reporters at The Guardian made fake accounts for a generic male user on both Instagram and Facebook — and then, without following any provocative accounts, were then served images of women barely wearing any clothing and sexist jokes.
The reporters started off the experiment by taking an unused smartphone, linking it up with a new email address, and then registering it at Instagram and Facebook, both platforms owned by parent company Meta.
The reporters made Instagram and Facebook profiles for a faux 24-year-old male, using it to add zero people on Facebook and follow only five “recommended accounts” on Instagram, since the app requires new accounts to do so.
Even without any interactions, the social media accounts’ feeds were rapidly filled with an escalating array of “sexist and misogynistic content.”
At first, the account on Facebook was exposed to memes and jokes from “The Office” and “Star Wars.” But as time went on, the account was bombarded with “highly sexist and misogynistic images” that “appeared in the feed without any input from the user.”
Meanwhile on Instagram, the account was served up images of women in bikinis and other barely-there clothing.
Hard Medicine
The Guardian contacted Meta for comment, but the tech company “refused to respond on the record.”
The content served up was no surprise to Monash University humanities and social sciences lecturer Stephanie Wescott, who has studied toxic male influencers like Andrew Tate.
“It’s kind of degrading for men for the algorithm to make this assumption about their interests… [that] you’re going to like these sort of misogynistic memes,” she told the newspaper.
Another researcher, University of Queensland associate professor in digital media Nicholas Carah, said it seems the algorithms are purposefully built to display this content to males, as shown in The Guardian‘s experiment.
“We have to think seriously about the informational environment young men are immersed in and the problem with platforms is they’ve made that information environment completely dark and ephemeral to anyone but those young men,” Carah told The Guardian.
It’s little known how this is impacting men, but we can perhaps see this effect in polls that show young men are becoming more conservative than women amid the rise of people like Tate, who know exactly how to game social networks.
And for any parent concerned about these toxic influences, the best remedy is probably to unplug totally from these platforms.
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