Gender and Social Change

The introduction of the internet marked a new age in society unlike anything history has ever seen. A crucial factor of the internet is that it’s free. Pretty much every app that has a social media platform, whether it be Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, or Instagram, all are free to download and free to use. This means that we, the people and our attention, are the product. Who are we being sold to? Advertising companies. Therefore, the way that social media platforms make their money is by keeping us scrolling. Enter the algorithm. All social media platforms create individualized content for each user through the usage of algorithms. Our pages, feeds, fyps, and explore pages are all carefully crafted to show us exactly what we want to see. For this section, we will primarily be focusing on the social media Tiktok, since I believe it perpetuates the issues with algorithms and the echo chamber the most. The idea of a social media echo chamber is that what you shout out will be shouted back. Essentially what this means is what you ‘like’ on instagram or tiktok or twitter, the app will find content related to what you liked and put that on your feed, constantly keeping track of what you like, how much time you spend looking at a post, what sends you into a rabbit hole, ect. For example, if I like a video about Greek mythology, I am likely to see more content on it. Which is a good thing in one way because my social media is providing me with material on things I am interested in and it is good for the social media platform owner and their creators that provide content because you are more likely to spend more time on your social medias this way, increasing profit. However, it can be a bad thing as well. The organization Media Matters for America ran an unofficial research study where they interacted exclusively with transphobic videos on tiktok, resulting in their feed on the company provided FYP (for you page, run by tiktok’s algorithm) being turned into far right extremism content. They achieved this by analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content. Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content. This research illustrates that on TikTok, engaging with anti-trans content alone is enough to turn an individual’s FYP into a place of extremism, hatred, and violence. [6] This algorithm method is also a great way to spread misinformation. TikTok’s algorithm seems to be promoting COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation to its users through personalized content recommendations, enabling conspiracy theories and medical misinformation to live on its platform. The same organization who conducted the above study, conducted this research in a similar manner. Their findings indicate that TikTok’s algorithm is heavily circulating anti-vaccination and COVID-19 misinformation videos, specifically feeding them to users who show interest. [7] A major feature of TikTok’s is its ability to hyperpersonalize video feeds to individual users, and this feature has seemingly created an unchecked medical misinformation catastrophe. This is the echo chamber and its effects. It is perhaps one of the many reasons why today's society is so polarized. People are being shown what they want to see and nothing else. Echo chamber turned social bubble is not a good thing. However, it is not all bad. These algorithms can also allow for people to find their communities and pave the way for opportunities to make connections. The Tiktok community, specifically, is divided into multiple, smaller communities often called “sides”, as in “what side of tiktok are you on?”, referring to what kind of content is on your page. It can best be described as a web. For example, I am on gay tiktok, which provides me with content discussing the complexity of sexuality and issues facing the gay community both internally and externally. Gay tiktok often leads to non binary and trans tiktok, where the videos and creators often discuss the complexities of gender and the necessity of respecting peoples’ pronouns. Gay tiktok also often branches off into bisexual and lesbean tiktok (referred to as la dolar bean tiktok, spelled as Le$bean). The reason as to why lesbean tiktok is called la dolar bean tiktok is because Tiktok censors the word “lesbean” and will often take down videos that have the word in the app provided video captions. Creators will often spell it as le$bean, so Tiktok won’t take their videos down. This of course, is a prime example of social media platforms censoring certain voices. More on this topic in the section White Feminism and its Social Media Shift.

6. Little, Olivia and Abbie Richardson. “TikTok's Algorithm Leads Users from Transphobic Videos to Far-Right Rabbit Holes.” Media Matters for America. Media Matters for America, October 5, 2021. https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-users-transphobic-videos-far-right-rabbit-holes.

7. Little, Olivia, and Abbie Richards. “TikTok's Algorithm Is Amplifying COVID-19 and Vaccine Misinformation.” Media Matters for America. Media Matters for America, August 18, 2021. https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-amplifying-covid-19-and-vaccine-misinformation.