An analytical study of the images that appear on the optional list on "Instagram" revealed that the software used by the social network, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, encourages images that contain a certain degree of nudity.
It seems that an American star realized this well, and published a photo of her in bathing suits to invite her 197 million followers to register their names on the electoral lists before the upcoming US presidential elections.
However, do the algorithms adopted in the social network encourage this path to promote the content posted on it?
The answer to this question appears in the affirmative, according to an investigation conducted by the "Algorithm Watch" last June, the results of which were published recently.
"Our results allow us to confirm that a picture of a woman in underwear or bathing suits appears 60% more than her pictures with all of her clothes," said Nicholas Kaiserbrill and Judith Duportay, the co-authors of the study, via the Mediapart website. "This percentage is 30% for men." .
To achieve this result, the researchers analyzed 1,737 posts on 37 Instagram accounts, followed by 26 volunteers who uploaded to their Internet browser a tool that allows counting the times each picture appears.
Instagram - which is preparing to celebrate its tenth anniversary - has stopped since 2016 from presenting images according to chronological order, and the application's algorithms choose the order of appearance in line with users' preferences, according to criteria that are still vague.
According to the study's authors, this may be based on the "level of nudity" that the service attributes to each photo the moment it is published.
The authors of the study mentioned a patent filed in 2011 by Facebook (which bought Instagram the following year), to protect the network by automatically detecting the degree of nudity in each image, through specific color bars.
However, a spokeswoman for "Instagram" commented - in response to a question by Agence France-Presse about this study - saying that it is "completely biased," adding that "the algorithms analyze the time users spend on certain types of content and the degree of interaction with them, to determine display priorities" that are appropriate. Every user, but "there is no patent (linked to a tool) to determine the degree of nudity, that's ridiculous."
The spokeswoman explained that the users ’recorded impression of seeing a lot of similar pictures - that is, containing nudity - is due to the users’ habits, who can change them by "searching for other types of pictures."
Social networks are constantly facing accusations of entrenching prevailing social patterns (Anatolia)
Too much decency
Social networks are constantly facing accusations of entrenching prevailing social patterns, by adapting them to a maximum extent the contents provided to users, while studies in this regard often collide with the lack of data provided by electronic platforms to support these conclusions.
The issue is particularly important for Instagram, in light of the economic responsibility that the application bears in terms of the revenues it provides to influencers through its service, through the revenues that brands provide to them according to the number of their followers, and also from the social perspective because it sets specific standards in terms of appearance for its more than more than One billion.
And paradoxically, "Instagram" is facing in parallel accusations of adopting standards of excessive decency, with criticisms, especially the lack of objectivity in the application of the rules on nudity.
These rules especially prohibit posts that "clearly focus on the back" or that display "bare bodysuits."
But in several cases, "Instagram" has blocked pictures of naked women showing chunky bodies, before re-showing them again.
This is what happened at the beginning of this year when the network withdrew pictures published by internet users carrying the cover of the French magazine "Telerama" regarding discrimination against obese people, and the magazine wrote at the time, "The algorithms of Facebook and Instagram and their sisters do not favor nudity, even when the pictures are not pornographic. Leslie Barbara Butch (record coordinator on the cover), she did not show any sexual organs or a naked breast, but she shows a large area of skin. It seems that this area is larger than what social networks allow. "
Instagram denies practicing any "censorship on a certain type of person," according to the spokeswoman, who says, "We may make mistakes, either by algorithms or by people." But "we do not count the proportion of nudity" shown in the pictures from the criteria, "this is a wrong belief." .