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"Last week we reported how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms are luring young men into the Manosphere. This week, we explore what happens when TikTok's algorithm is unleashed on a blank account in the absence of any interactions such as liking or commenting. In April, Guardian Australia set up a new TikTok account on a completely blank smartphone linked to a new, unused email address. A John Doe profile was set up as a generic 24-year-old male. We scrolled through the feed every couple of weeks."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"When Google's algorithms result in men on the Internet seeing better-paying job advertisements than women, it's worth looking under the hood at the assumptions that the algorithms, and the people behind it, have made. "

"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."

"Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian's four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter"

"The greatest propaganda machine in history. Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.""

"But today that universe seeks and surrounds you. When you first join Facebook you make a few choices of your own. But soon the algorithm starts narrowing your options and deciding what further choices to present to you. Because many of us rely on a limited number of news sources that populate our social media feeds, our information universe becomes more and more niche. For Trump supporters, that universe is often paramilitary."

"But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its "trending module" headlines - the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook's desktop version. The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users' feeds."

"As adolescents and young adults fled Facebook for platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook knew its long-term survival depended on winning over that demographic. But the savvy business move had a different, less public price tag. Caught up in recommendations from a powerful algorithm designed to keep them engaged, some teen girls found Instagram worsened their body image, according to a new Wall Street Journal investigation. Users even pinned feelings of increased depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking on the app."

"People have been censored or blocked from the platform because their names sounded too fake. Ads for clothing disabled people we removed buy algorithms that believed they were breaking the rules and promoting medical devices. The Vienna Tourist Board had to move to adult content friendly site OnlyFans to share works of art from their museum after Facebook removed photos of paintings. Words that have rude popular meanings but other more specific definitions in certain circles - like "hoe" amongst gardeners, or "cock" amongst chicken farmers or gun enthusiasts - can land people in the so-called "Facebook jail" for days or even weeks."

"Some Facebook users who recently watched a Daily Mail video depicting Black men reported seeing a label from Facebook asking if they were interested in watching more videos about "primates." The label appeared in bold text under the video, stating "Keep seeing videos about Primates?" next to "Yes" and "Dismiss" buttons that users could click to answer the prompt. It's part of an AI-powered Facebook process that attempts to gather information on users' personal interests in order to deliver relevant content into their News Feed"

"In the last year, Facebook adjusted some of the most fundamental rules about what gets posted on its platform, halting algorithmic recommendations of political groups, banning lies about vaccines and removing a number of high-profile figures for spreading misinformation and hate - including Donald Trump. But researchers say the social media platform is not enforcing those policies as effectively when it comes to misinformation in Spanish - a blind spot that may prove deadly as health lies spread through the most vulnerable populations during the global vaccine effort."

"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."

""This is the first time such machine learning tools have been used in this context," says Fluri, "and we found that the deep artificial neural network enables us to extract more information from the data than previous approaches. We believe that this usage of machine learning in cosmology will have many future applications.""

"acebook has come under fire this week after a hoax story about women being abducted in white vans went viral on its platform. The site's algorithms are thought to have perpetuated the circulation of the story."

"Facebook has said it will start labelling misinformation about the climate crisis in a small trial limited to the UK. Labels will be attached to certain posts directing users to Facebook's Climate Science Information Center, a repository of fact-checked claims about the environment. The company has not yet said how it will decide which posts receive the label, but the process is similar to that used in the US election when it attempted to algorithmically discern posts that shared common myths or misconceptions, and appended a link taking users to a "voting information centre"."

"Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed, from its broadcasting live killings, to editing out an iconic photo of the Vietnam war, to accusations of political bias. It recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories."

"YouTube will rely more on machine learning and less on human reviewers during the coronavirus outbreak. Normally, algorithms detect potentially harmful content and send it to human reviewers for assessment. But these are not normal times, and in an effort to reduce the need for employees and contractors to come into an office, YouTube will allow its automated system to remove some content without human review."

"Facebook's gol' durn algorithm is acting up again, say humans working at Meta, who apparently have no control over the automated system that approved ads calling for the murder of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his children."

"If Facebook cared about unfair profiling and privacy abuse, for instance, it would probably not have started grouping its users together based on their "Ethnic Affinity". It wouldn't then allow that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for excluding users from advertisements, and it certainly wouldn't allows that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for potentially illegal discrimination in real estate advertising."