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Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

algorithmwatch.org

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#31
> While our results show that male and female content creators are forced to show skin in similar ways if they want to reach their audience, the effect could be larger for females, and be considered a discrimination of female entrepreneurs.

Overall this article strikes me as a large collection of pseudo-science but this sentence baffles me the most. Is the author arguing against their own conclusions?

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but as opposed to "offensive suggestions", there is nothing wrong with showing-skin.

Unless your don't want to, but you are obliged to use IG because your business focuses on a demographic on which IG has a monopoly (the 15-25 demographics in the EU).

Nobody is "obliged" to use it.

You can also buy ads if you want to show your posts to people, like any other business does.

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#34
Wow, a social media network the average Joe visits promotes stuff the average Joe might enjoy. How is this news? Any sane algorithm would tailor posts' visibility to the lowest common denominator, and that's what IG seems to do here. I don't even use IG and it makes sense.

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#35
post #29

This 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/

That's a major missing hypothesis that seriously undermines your conclusion.

Why do you need me to share data at all? Just create brand new accounts and test what they see in a more controlled manner. Then you'll be able to test what's recommended from the same accounts over time while building any specific profiles yourself.

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#36
post #12

> the label “beauty”, for instance, was only returned for females Males just dont look good, or something. Edit: as someone noted before, my point was not that that men look badly. More that it is ridiculous bias I did not even noticed before.

People disagreeing with this comment: please consider what the post is trying to highlight.

There's an apparent asymmetry in how imagery of females is perceived, vs. similarly posing males. Commercials employing 'sex sells' tactics are still biased towards using the female sex to sell. Reddits' r/gonewild and offshoots is pretty huge, and filled with females. This is a truism.

The label 'beauty' being only returned for females highlights this asymmetry. There is something deeply absurd about this: on a first order approximation, ~50% of the population should be attracted to males. To me personally it is enlightening to see how 'smart' data driven systems expose the systemic biases in our society.

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#37

> While our results show that male and female content creators are forced to show skin in similar ways if they want to reach their audience, the effect could be larger for females, and be considered a discrimination of female entrepreneurs. Overall this article strikes me as a large collection of pseudo-science but this sentence baffles me the most. Is the author arguing against their own conclusions?

I think it's called "subtlety" but I'm no native speaker.

Re: Instagram prioritizes photos of scantily-clad men and women

#38
post #2

It 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.

While it's probably based on engagement, it's still a flaw of the algorithms I feel. Just because other people engages more with the content, doesn't mean it's the correct content for a given hashtag / following.

For instance, I mostly follow cycling and running stuff on IG. The suggestions / explore feed is therefore full of women in short running shorts and bicycle jerseys with the zipper down. It's not really that relevant content considering what I actually follow, but I think the engagement those things get push all other cycling / running related content away.

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