Social Media and Gender Bias

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Social Media and Gender Bias
As more people browsing online increasingly depend on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to interact with friends, they are faced with new challenges. These social media websites are useful as news outlets even though biases also arise along the lines of gender (Schroeder 376). Due to cultural shifts in gender and the increasing awareness of the diversity of gender, internet algorithms often reinforce dualist, hierarchical views about gender. Furthermore, these algorithms influence how gender is recirculated, processed among social media users (Schroeder 377). As a result, social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are linked to increasing levels of gender bias since they reinforce the stereotypical notions of gender.
Social media addiction arises due to the numerous benefits offered by online platforms such as online "dating," online education, e-commerce, and news silos when users are trying to find online communities with the same interest. However, these benefits are supported by algorithms that are gender-biased. Gender is defined as the sociocultural interpretation of our sex (Hamilton 146). This is how people make sense of the biology around us. While female and male are biological distinctions, feminine and masculine are gender distinctions. Algorithms can be biased since humans create them, contributing to gender discrimination on social media (Hamilton 147). Algorithms have been proven to learn gender and then incorporate gender biases, thereby reflecting the damaging stereotypes regarding women. According to Schroeder. "algorithms pick up cultural biases and feed them back into the online environment, without much awareness from users of what is happening, or how their social media feed is built" (377).
A good example is an advertisement that was placed on Facebook to promote careers in the STEM field. The results found that more men see the ad than women, yet attempts had been made to make it a gender-neutral advertisement. The women did not click on the advertisement because they were fewer. In reality, women would be more interested in such an advertisement. However, due to the discriminatory algorithms, few women saw the advertainments (Schroeder 377). Another good reason for this is that most advertisements involve goods and services are targeted at women. Women are more likely to be targeted with such advertisements since they are traditionally expected to manage household expenses (Schroeder 377). Algorithms are very influential in what happens online. They determine what the advertisement contains, what people read, and even what they ultimately purchase.
Social media has become very common, especially now that it is being used as a business tool for influencers who earn a living from having many followers. However, this also increases the chance of these influencers releasing fake news, leading to gender bias (Allcott & Gentzkow 212). A key aspect of social media is that anyone can sign up as a news publisher without any verification process. For instance, anyone on Facebook can create a page claiming to be a news organization. Furthermore, the traditional news organizations are also moving online, and new...