AlgorithmWatch shuts down Instagram monitoring after threats from Facebook
The research is interesting in its data. The conclusions are very speculative and don&#x27;t sound very well informed. The problem with nudity or clickbait in general is simply that it appeals to most people, statistically, and thus tends to emerge on its own as an apparent ranking factor even when there might be nothing in the algorithm itself to boost it specifically. The simpler models end up being the more clickbaity ones. If anything, when algorithms do take into account nudity explicitly, my guess is that it&#x27;s primarily to prevent too much of it (eg porn).<p>Another problem in general with this sort of research is that it seems to take for granted a moral ground in which it is irresponsible to give people what they want to see most (statistically) if some people don&#x27;t want to see it, or if it doesn&#x27;t match what the people involved in production want to project. I&#x27;m not sure what grounds it. It seems to broadly describe media. I received a promotional copy of Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and it&#x27;s pretty transparent that it&#x27;s being done with a mindset of &quot;sex sells&quot;. I dislike it but I dislike media censorship more, so I just don&#x27;t use Instagram or subscribe to lewd magazines. This group would be more convincing if they explored more of the moral underpinnings of their outrage and whether what they recommend is more morally motivated self-censorship by the platform (even though we know that users want to see skin, we think they shouldn&#x27;t, so we&#x27;re not going to), plain-old &quot;white box&quot; ranking algorithms like reverse chron (which is completely non biased from the point of view of the metric they were looking at in the nudity article, but just as susceptible to abuse in other ways), or something else...<p>EDIT: I don&#x27;t mean this to defend the status quo. I&#x27;m just as outraged as the next person about exploitative social media. I just think it&#x27;s not clear what the moral framing is and I think it&#x27;s interesting to discuss it.