Facebook Discontinues Instagram Algorithm Research
After threatening them with legal action, AlgorithmWatch researchers from Germany had to quit their Instagram algorithm study project. AlgorithmWatch started a project in March 2020 to analyze Instagram’s newsfeed algorithm. Approximately 1,500 volunteers participated in the experiment over the course of 14 months. Installing an add-on that scraped their newsfeeds and sent the information to AlgorithmWatch. This is in order to discover how the business prioritized photos and videos on a timeline. “Using their data, we were able to demonstrate that Instagram likely incentivized content producers to publish images that matched certain depictions of their bodies. Politicians might reach a bigger audience by avoiding language in their publications,” AlgorithmWatch says. Both of these assertions are denied by Facebook. To be more specific, the first data point revealed that Instagram appeared to urge users to expose more skin than usual. Following their discovery, AlgorithmWatch sough...