Image Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
I rarely “like” photos on Instagram. As someone who takes a voyeuristic approach to the Facebook-owned social image sharing app, I will spend a good 5 minutes scrolling through the snapshots of other peoples’ lives daily, but few times will I actually engage with these photos by lackadaisically double-tapping and throwing a heart their way. One of the very few times I did like a photo was following the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex marriage would become legal in all 50 US states, when I hearted a post from Crave’s official Instagram page celebrating the landmark event. Shortly following me doing so, I found my Search and Explore tab suddenly being littered with photos of muscular men with erections prodding through their boxer shorts. As a straight man, it was a weird time for me.
After putting up with these aroused men forcibly inserting themselves into my Instagram experience for a couple of weeks, I eventually had enough of looking at rock hard abdominal muscles/penises, so considered that I’d need to start liking more photos in order to successfully dilute my increasingly homosexual feed. With this being at a point in time when we were all looking forward to The Force Awakens, I decided to browse the #StarWars tag and begin liking images there. This had another strange impact upon my Search and Explore tab, as it successfully combined the aforementioned slew of penises with images of R2-D2 and C-3PO, creating a confusing collage of droids and dicks.
I’m sharing this little anecdote with you in order to highlight how the algorithms behind Instagram are, to put it kindly, a mess. Search and Explore, which is accessed by tapping on the magnifying glass on the app, ostensibly curates all of the images and accounts it believes the user may be interested in, but the logic behind the content the app feels may appeal to you is kept vague. According to Instagram, the app “may show you photos liked by people whose posts you’ve liked or posts that are liked by a large number of people in the Instagram community,” but there’s no specifics in regards to how it tailors these experiences.
I’ve had images from accounts I’ve searched for pop up routinely to the point where I might as well have followed them in the first place, along with photos that would certainly appeal to a few of the friends I’m following, but not to me. Like most algorithms utilized by social networks in order to “learn” more about their users, the problem with Instagram is that its knowledge of an individual is limited to that hashtag they searched for one time, or that they once posted a photo of an apple which therefore means that their favorite hobby must be the obtaining and eating of apples. But while it may be a little irritating and quite creepy to have an app force its opinion of who you are upon you, it wasn’t until my girlfriend started to complain about her issues with it that it occurred to me just how wrong the app gets it when it comes to a user-tailored experience.
A photo of a man enjoying his Instagram experience, as a result of not having to look at images of seals being clubbed to death.
She’s a much more prolific Instagrammer than I, routinely posting photos of her cooking alongside ingredients and recipes. Recently she has been cooking a lot of vegan food, including the #vegan hashtag alongside them. This has now effectively seen her Search and Explore tab become host to vegan Instagram activists, who routinely post images of dismembered animals, animal abuse and other such graphic photos to the app. With her having also liked various images of adorable foxes, she has now also found herself privy to images of foxes skinned for their fur.
But Instagram won’t stop showing her these images. Deleting her search history several times has had no effect, as the images continue to reappear on her Search and Explore tab. After liking one of her posts, my feed has also become inundated with images of animal abuse, too. The app’s rudimentary algorithms essentially suggest that if I like a photo of a salad, I must therefore also like a photo of a fox with the skin hanging from its bones.
I do not.
I do not like the photo of a fox with its skin hanging off its body.
Right now browsing through my girlfriend’s feed is like looking at a weird amalgamation of a cookery book for people with iron deficiency and Rotten.com, but at this point, there appears to be no way to prevent these images from popping up outside of deleting the app or throwing her iPhone into the sea. Considering the heat Facebook faced for graphic videos of beheadings and other such violent imagery routinely popping up on peoples’ feeds, it’s surprising to me that the NSFW/NSFL images I’ve been privy to as a result of the Instagram’s own algorithms haven’t caused more of a stir.
Paul Tamburro is the Tech, UK and Gaming Editor of CRAVE. Follow him on Twitter @PaulTamburro.
