The source google doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L7A5hmskm3Y3huSXHNtIIoiV... is very informative while the website is down
Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#22I find myself realizing that as I clicked on the post, I was hoping it would include example pictures of attractive instagram models. I expect the results may be predominantly a reflection of human nature...
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#23You used to be able to click attractive profiles in the sidebar of LinkedIn to successively attain a sidebar that was full of model-looking people. I wish the around-the-network sidebar for Stack Exchange worked like that but eventually gave you an absolutely insane list of questions.
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#24Hmm, if ppl press like on those photos more, isn't the algorithm just faithfull reproducing human preference on average? Why say instagram is prioritising? Makes it sound like Instagram. Is sentient.
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#25They analyzed images with “Google Vision API”, but did not make even an attempt to correlate with number of likes, comments etc. What a waste of time in so-called investigation.
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#26It seems like the possibility that photos-of-undress are promoted by organic engagement is not discussed? (aka people seem to be clicking on this). Confession: this is the first thing that sprang to mind for me. Not that algorithms suck or companies suck (though both of those are true) but that people suck.
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Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#27It seems like the possibility that photos-of-undress are promoted by organic engagement is not discussed? (aka people seem to be clicking on this). Confession: this is the first thing that sprang to mind for me. Not that algorithms suck or companies suck (though both of those are true) but that people suck.
The article points to a Facebook patent for an "engagement metric" created at time of posting (that is, before user interaction) which specifically calls out "state of undress" as a factor to consider: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H... . ...and this metric is used to determine what gets shown in people's feeds.
The patent link was not working for me, here is an alternative: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8929615B2/
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#28This seems rather thin on describing the feeds that these users are following. How "diverse" are they? What's that even mean? Did they check which posts are getting the most interactions (by their other followers)?
Unless these posts are completely new, how can they know that this isn't Instagram prioritizing the posts that already have the most engagement organically?
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#29This seems rather thin on describing the feeds that these users are following. How "diverse" are they? What's that even mean? Did they check which posts are getting the most interactions (by their other followers)? Unless these posts are completely new, how can they know that this isn't Instagram prioritizing the posts that already have the most engagement organically?
We didn't have enough data to test these hypotheses. If more people contribute their data, we'll be able to test that: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/instagram-algorithm/
Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women
#30This is a sample size of one but I think I may have helped the algorithm learn this behaviour