Some users of Instagram may soon be prompted for their race and ethnicity
 |
According to a blog post published today by the firm, Instagram will start requesting race and ethnicity information from a subset of US users in order to research how various demographic groups utilize the site.
Randomly selected Instagram users will experience a pop-up in the app that directs them to a YouGov poll that asks about their race and ethnicity. It's optional to respond to the questions, and Instagram claims that doing so "won't limit your experiences on Instagram, including having an impact on your reach or how people connect with your material in any way."
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri stated in a video message that the platform will utilize the data to find ways to make Instagram better for users.
"We need to understand how it is working for different populations if we're going to make sure that Instagram is fair and equal as an experience," he says.
Instagram established an equity team in 2020 with the goal of examining its algorithms for racial bias. Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced last autumn that they were developing a means to gauge "how people from underrepresented areas experience Meta technology."
There are countless media reports on how platforms have allowed for discrimination, and civil rights organizations and other advocates have long urged Facebook and other social media platforms to look into how their systems affect people of color. For instance, The Washington Post reported in 2021 that officials at Meta resisted an ambitious plan targeted at deleting the "worst of the worst" content despite internal data that its hate speech removal technologies disproportionately hurt black users.
The data will be de-identified, divided, and kept across a few academic institutions, including Texas Southern University, University of Central Florida, Northeastern University, and Oasis Labs, after the user replies have been gathered. According to Instagram's blog post, the firm will only receive aggregated data from the collaborating institutions, and individual comments won't be connected to user accounts.
According to the blog post, "this information will help us better understand the experiences that various communities have on Instagram, how our technology may affect various groups, and whether there are any improvements we can make to encourage justice." The analysis we perform using this data, for instance, "could help us better understand the experiences different communities may have when it comes to how we rank content.
Post a Comment