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That is interesting, and kinda weird. Where is the line I wonder? If Netflix effectively says “you seem to like watching gay stuff, here’s more gay content”,
by Nursie 3y ago
That is interesting, and kinda weird.
Where is the line I wonder?
If Netflix effectively says “you seem to like watching gay stuff, here’s more gay content”, is that wrong? Because it seems like that’s not Netflix targeting a user’s sexuality, just their viewing preferences.
OTOH it’s pretty harrowing to hear about people in (for instance) Uganda who are outed by an algorithm and (whether it is correct or not) find themselves ostracised or worse.
- b800h 3y agoI've definitely had situations on Spotify where I've been listening to Abba and the Scissor Sisters, and started to be offered playlists aimed at LGBT people, but this is musical-choice targeting. It just happens that I like stuff that gay people like.
- alias_neo 3y agoSpotify algorithms are complete trash. There was a period when, for some reason, it would recommend playlists related to getting "tarted up", "makeup on", being a "powerful woman" etc and recommending lots of music it thinks is for women. Though I do listen to a wide variety of music, there's nothing notable I'd say could encourage it to believe that. Generally I play metal and rock, grime, rap, hip-hop; but also classical, some pop and indie, occasionally "UK Top 50", "Coding Mode" and "Jazz Vibes" playlists and lots of children's bath time songs. I had to have a purge and its much better now but I still avoid the auto-playlists.
- b800h 3y agoI bet you it's the children's bath-time songs that did it. Very mumsnet-on-the-razz.
- alias_neo 3y agoIt's a weird one, the playlists it was creating for me had a very "young woman" vibe, say 20s, aside from not being a woman I am not that young either, also, does Spotify think parenting is only for mums? I wonder if it had something to do with my location; I was living in London and now live in the North.
- xg15 3y agoI'd argue it is, and it should be so even in the US. Even if Netflix's intentions had been perfectly benign - and even if they didn't specifically target this category but only did so emergently through some unsupervised algorithm - they now have a way to find out for all of their customers whether they are closetted gay. Imagine someone like Trump or Desantis or even worse coming to power. People like those will certainly find such databases helpful, and they won't care at all whether the data is ostensibly about viewing preferences or directly about sexual orientation.
- Nursie 3y agoYeah I absolutely agree that it’s chilling what could be done with that information and it won’t matter to such people whether it’s accurate. I mentioned Uganda because I listened to a story earlier in the week about a man being thrown out of his mother’s home because she saw his Tik-Tok feed and it was full of very openly gay content. So we don’t necessarily have to imagine it - in some places this is already happening.
- dangles 3y agoNo need for a counterfactual, how do you think Trump used this data when he came to power?
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoNo idea, what did he do?