World News

38705 readers

11 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

607

We unleashed Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms on blank accounts. They served up sexism and misogyny (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Well it also looks at stuff like the other devices connected from the same IP, other devices near where you connect from and then based on this also hones the served content.

So if the author/some colleague or even the neighbors are red pilled/MGTOW/Chriso-Fachists etc this also makes sense. Possibly even their research into these subjects slanted the results. Let alone what happens if they spun up a VM at a cloud farm and used it from there.

I'm in no way surprised that "social" media corps serve up vile shit for profit ik just not convinced by some random let's see what happens.

Edit: I'd be for a law that required targeted ads to have a small "why you see this" and if you click it the company is required to show you the selection criteria that caused this ad to be served to you in an easy to understand format. (Leaving out all the irrelevant criteria).. ie.

You where selected by the following criteria:

region: europe
gender: male
interests: Games, Lemmy, politics

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's also probably looking at scroll speed. So if the people conducting the experiment tended to linger longer examining content they disliked, that could result in getting more of it.

Would need to see a more detailed explanation of the methodology. Ideally the scrolling was done in an automated way, at a consistent speed.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Yep, it’s called dwell time and it is 100% one of the metrics used by the algorithms that decide what content to serve up.