Mike Caulfield's latest web incarnation. Networked Learning, Open Education, and Online Digital Literacy
The speed with which Pinterest radicalizes your feed with conspiracy-based disinfo is shocking. I speed up this video by 400% but the entire process takes less than 13 minutes I think. Here’s the final frame. I got here without taking a single explicit antivax action (e.g. I didn’t follow any antivax boards):
Please watch the whole video. It may even shock the cynical.
Fascinating, Mike.
Questions:
1) Are all of those pins that you didn’t pick out yourself suggested by Pinterest algos?
2) Why did Pinterest surface so many anti-vax pins, when you’d also pinned unrelated topics (food, drink, gardening, recipes)?
3) If we consider the cosmos of Pinterest items related to vaccination, what proportion is anti-vax? (If that’s knowable)
To be clear, I don’t really use Pinterest. I’ve read about it in many ways, and have used some images.
Finally, the answer to why my Pinterest front page is so full of **** that I have zero interest in. I cannot be alone in never looking at the front page and quickly trying to go elsewhere. I would ask, why on earth Pinterest aren’t aware that their own algorithm is so producing such bad results? I know, let’s ask!
Mandy — has it gotten worse for you recently? I wonder how much is gaming.
[…] fake and real images, sourcing quotes, but his latest post was one that threw the switch for me, on digital polarization on pinterest. (An aside, I gave up on pinterest because I can’t be bothered to log in every time I need to […]
I pin fanart, recipes, and journal inspiration every day. At the very least Pinterest gives you a button to get more pins like the one you’re currently viewing. Using that, I’ve found that I’m constantly steering Pinterest’s algorithm away from pins about nutritional pseudoscience and pro-gun activism. If I click on even one, my feed fills up with them all over again.
Reblogged this on Inventing Learning and commented:
This is just scary when I think of sending our students out to research something on the internet.
[…] to Cogdog for pointing me to this blog post at Hapgood, because it is wild: Digital Polarization on Pinterest Is Scary Aggressive. “The speed with which Pinterest radicalizes your feed with conspiracy-based disinfo is […]
[…] to Cogdog for pointing me to this blog post at Hapgood, because it is wild: Digital Polarization on Pinterest Is Scary Aggressive. “The speed with which Pinterest radicalizes your feed with conspiracy-based disinfo is […]
[…] critiques of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm as well as Caulfield’s demonstration of polarization on Pinterest). These rarely show up in discussions around bots and AI in education, critiques of learning […]
Hapgood 
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