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.
The John Doe profiles were set up in April as generic 24-year-old males. Facebook was able to gather some other information, such as the phone’s type and its location in Melbourne, but we opted out of ad tracking so it could not tell what we were doing outside of the app.
Facebook had little to rely upon in the absence of any likes, comments or accounts added as friends. Meanwhile, Instagram makes users follow at least five accounts to start, so we chose the popular recommended accounts, including the prime minister and Bec Judd.
Meta says its algorithms rank content according to what people are interested in, but we wanted to find out where it would take us in the absence of such inputs. We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks to check what was being served up.
What did we see?
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.
On Instagram, while the explore page has filled with scantily-clad women, the feed is largely innocuous, mostly recommending Melbourne-related content and foodie influencers.
What does Meta say?
Meta was approached for comment but refused to respond on the record.
In its submission to the federal parliament’s social media inquiry, Meta says it uses “a range of different algorithms” to help rank content shown in feeds on Facebook and Instagram, with some helping “us understand what content is most meaningful to people so we can order it accordingly in their feeds”.
The company said that what people see is “heavily influenced by their own choices and actions” and “each person’s feed is highly personalised and specific to them”.
“Our ranking system personalises the content for over a billion people and aims to show each of them content we hope is most valuable and meaningful, every time they come to Facebook or Instagram.”
The company says it assesses posts for signals such as who posted it, how popular it is, the type of device being used, and then uses ranking algorithms to predict how likely the post is to be relevant and meaningful to a person.
“The goal is to make sure people see what they will find most meaningful – not to keep people glued to their smartphone for hours on end.”
Meta said it also uses the ranking to assess whether a post is likely to be problematic, but does not violate community standards. That includes clickbait, unoriginal news stories and posts fact-checked as false.
It’s ‘baked into the model’
Guardian Australia’s findings align with similar experiments carried out in 2022 and 2024 in Australia and Ireland on YouTube and TikTok, in which multiple accounts set up as young men and teens were funnelled to “Manosphere” content.
Dr Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer in humanities and social sciences at Monash University, conducted research into the influence of Manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate on school-aged boys and told Guardian Australia our investigation results for Facebook were not surprising.
“Based on the research I’m doing and also what we know [from other research] this is what we know the algorithm will provide and serve up to young men, based on what it assumed will capture their interest,” she said.
“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.”
Nicholas Carah, an associate professor in digital media at the University of Queensland, said the experiment showed how “baked into the model” serving up such content to young men is on Facebook.
“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,” he said.
“There has to be some kind of public imperative here where platforms help civil society, journalists, researchers, regulators, whoever, observe what these informational flows look like so that we can have some kind of public understanding, public scrutiny, and public debate about them.”
Wescott said platforms need to answer questions on how the algorithms work because currently they are unaccountable.
“They’re beyond reproach and they don’t seem to be willing to put any sort of alterations or restrictions on their algorithm.”
‘River of complete garbage’
The quality of what is served on Facebook to every user in Australia had declined in the past few years, Carah says, coinciding with Meta’s decision to deprioritise news as it gears up to fight against paying media companies under Australia’s news media bargaining code.
“Australians are now immersed in this river of complete garbage on Facebook. I’m kind of curious, does this mean we’ll all just keep scrolling through this crap? Or is Facebook actually undermining their own product here?”
Wescott says it’s important people are educated to critically assess what is being served to them on social media and not to accept it as a reflection of reality. She praises the federal government’s Stop it at the Start campaign, which includes an “Algorithm of Disrespect” interactive depicting what a young man may encounter on social media.
The federal government has also funded a $3.5m three-year trial to counteract the harmful impacts of social media messaging targeting young men and boys.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, says digital platforms need to do more to ensure that community standards are respected online as well as offline.
“We’re seeing misogynistic content pushed to young people through algorithms and recommender systems on social media. This is simply not good enough,” she says.
“Our expectation is clear: online platforms need take reasonable steps to ensure Australians can use their services in a safe manner, and to proactively minimise unlawful and harmful material and activity on their services.”
The social services minister, Amanda Rishworth, says combatting misogynistic attitudes and behaviour in the online and offline world will help achieve the national plan to end violence against women and children in one generation.
“Around 25% of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes and condone violence against women - this is shocking,” she says.
“And particularly if this content is being served up in young men’s social feeds without any interaction whatsoever, social media companies need to do more.”
