Representation sells (you, that is)
It took me approximately six years to get over my first ever disastrous coming out, and by “coming out”, I mean I-mentioned-a-girl-is-pretty-in-elementary-school-and-was-bullied-to-hell-for-it. It took me about, poetically, forgive me if that’s not my biggest priority, 6 seconds and a screenshot, to have that fall apart on me all over again.
Welcome, readers, to a dramatic play-by-play of one of the worst interactions I had in my life, or why the overcollection of data is not the way to representation.
When we still don’t have the protocols to keep minorities safe, when the point of representation is not for the people but the people behind algorithms, simply collecting more data will only serve to harm the population advertisers and developers claim to serve.
Boyd & Crawford asks “‘Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods?’ or ‘will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing?’” in their paper Critical Questions for Big Data. Spoiler alert: currently, the internet does not care about representation unless they can sell you something. Or if they can sell you, period.
“If something is free, you are the product.” Back in 1973, this comment was about how it was the television that delivered people to an advertiser. In 2018 (and still now, in 2022), the same can be said about social media.
February 8th, 2018. For me, the day started at 6:30 am.
For them, it started in 2008, when I created my Facebook account. I lied, as everyone did, saying I was born in 1905, called myself Cat. This amorphous all-seeing entity gave me entertainment that suited my needs better and faster every time.
Except that it isn’t amorphous. “Library classifications in the ideal are ambitious, totalizing projects: they seek to contain not only the present sum of human knowledge but also to encompass any new knowledge generated in the future.” (Design Justice) We treat library systems as these safe public spaces, but often forget that there is a face behind them. The Golden Gate Bridge did not just plop down into existence; some people found a need for it and funded it. Libraries and data collected are the same. Like yours or mine, some hands shifted through documents and carried some inherent bias in how they see the world. You think that the Dark Web is the anti-government underground internet? The US Naval Research Laboratory created it. We’re allowed to use it because everyone would know it’s a CIA agent if they’re the only ones using it. The content we’re presented is carefully curated by invisible hands, a set of hands with intent.
To earn money. Data brokers are watching you everywhere.
Fast forward a few years, in 2013, I created a fandom account. I follow nobody from my personal account, no photos from anything in my real life. I made 40 posts in two years, then forgot about it as interests shifted.
This is where it really began.
February 8th, 2018, 8:45 am. Morning period. My classmate has her legs on the desk, scrolling through her phone.
“Check Instagram.” A meme. I snorted, swiping out of her messages when I saw It. A message request, username never seen before, but so intimately, dreadfully familiar. Against my better judgment, I click on it. It’s a screenshot of a different post.
A post of a pride pin, a little circle of my fandom account in the list of likers.
“still f — ing disgusting, but thanks for all you’re doing for us, btw. it is fun.”
(I’ve deleted the message thread. It’s a little harder to delete messages from my brain.)
My hands still entirely. The person behind the account was my reason for being bullied-to-hell. Fun to her meant being locked in a cupboard overnight when I stayed over. Fun to her meant having her entire family disparage and insult my face, accuse me of stealing. Fun to her meant homophobia, and justifiable assault because of it.
Why is she using present tense?
My lungs constrict, the screen goes dark. The bell rings.
In 2018, LGBTQ+ exposure might be miles away from what they were in 2012. But how much of it is for genuine education, content made by LGBTQ+ folks, and how much of it is queerbaiting?
Dumbledore is gay because blind inclusivity via virtual signaling is now the way to earn money. A display of representation, sure, but because they aren’t real, they will never suffer the repercussions of their actions. They will never go so far that they end up losing the money earned from homophobic people because they have a choice. Every June, companies’ logos around the interwebs turn rainbow, only to tolerate sexism and transphobia in the workplace culture. Bo Burnham sums it up the best: “The question is no longer, ‘Do you want to buy Wheat Thins?’ For example, the question is now, ‘Will you support Wheat Thins in the fight against Lyme disease?’” Being a company no longer means selling a product. It means selling an ideology. Those ideologies are carefully curated to suit whatever the current trend is, regardless of whether the companies believe it, and right now, that ideology is representation.
10:20 am. I managed to shove the message to the back of my mind for a solid two periods. The pin was cute. It’s a cat with a rainbow top hat. I was going to figure out how much shipping would be… and whether me getting it would be worth the risk of anyone who comes across it questioning me. I could just like colors?
Oh, who am I kidding. I did not, for a second, want possible torture or prosecution, nor did I particularly want to have the “you’re too promiscuous!” conversation. Of course, it is me, the emotionally constipated teenager, that is a sexual deviant, and not everyone who decides toddlers of opposite sexes who hold hands will marry each other.
On YouTube, now increasingly turning to its target audience of young kids, videos containing “gay” or “lesbian” and other LGBTQ+ terms are disproportionately flagged as inappropriate for young audiences and subsequently demonetized, even if it otherwise does not indicate anything mature. And surprise, surprise, the people most affected by this problem? LGBTQ+ educators who are actually spreading awareness. On the other hand, heterosexual relationships can be depicted in all their full glory in music videos in the name of “art”. Equality, they say, when they mean representation makes money, off the people they are supposed to be helping.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve never dated at 20, much less 17; it doesn’t matter that I also do creative writing and photography or everything else that I never post about. The algorithm is constantly improving, hoping to make me stay for a minute, two minutes longer. The algorithm catches me as I fall for the first time, classifies me, and digs deeper. I hold a flag in my hands, a tiny little rainbow flag not in pride, but a glaring sign of “hey! I’m underrepresented, and I will watch anything that gives me clarity because I’m traumatized!”
12:35 pm. I get out for lunch late. It’s also the first time since my revelation I had the time to look at my phone again. A few of the people from my elementary school follow her. Okay, fair, it sort of made sense she’d be able to figure my personal account out.
But how did she find my fandom account? What connection did the algorithm find to connect her to me? I go through every single person I followed from that account. Nothing.
In her testimony, Donovan states that “mapping, tracking, and aggregating people’s social networks made social media a viable business because companies could sell data derived from interactions or monetize those relationships as other products, such as advertising”.
Just by glancing at my discovery feed right now, there are so, so many posts that end with some form of “love wins! buy my product!”. It was never about what I wanted to share or who I wanted to share the experience with.
The algorithm does not simply collect my information; it spreads it to everyone I might be in contact with, using me as a tool for their advertisement.
12:50pm. I go through everyone she follows. Still nothing.
People say that social media helps them connect with friends with similar interests they would never have found otherwise. I can’t disagree with that, but that is by the people, not by the algorithm. The algorithm blindly casts a net to everything it can reach. Sometimes it creates beautiful friendships. Sometimes… this happens.
1:10pm. Lunch ends. We get a reading period, and I continue.
1:40pm. I find what I think is the connection. Two people from my real life followed the account without my knowledge. One of them had a mutual friend with her friend. Or maybe it’s just that I used the same email I gave her for some miscellaneous project once upon a time to register for that account. I will never know.
Perhaps Zuckerberg does. Donovan testified that he wrote in a company email “allowing developers access to data without having these companies share their data with Facebook would be ‘good for the world, but bad for us.’” They know how powerful their collected information is and how much they can grow by melding to human behavior. Like the Age of Surveillance Capitalism warns, human experiences become data to be sold, manipulated, and exploited.
Or maybe he doesn’t. The ways they collect data are so vast they don’t even remember what they have anymore.
3:15 pm. School ends. I contemplate what to do in between the three-quarters of an hour I have before club activities. The red bar of “report” stares back at me. What can I say it was? A threat? There isn’t a way for me to elaborate on why I think the subtle cues of tenses and the misuse of the word “fun” scares me so much. And by “there isn’t”, I don’t mean I would not like to. I mean, there is no option to. Hate speech? I guess technically she didn’t throw a slur at me.
It could’ve been worse. I click on hate speech and hope the picture and the caption does it justice.
8 pm. It’s long past sunset. Music sounds softly from my headphones as I walk to the bus stop. It’s not cold, but I shiver anyway. I wonder whether she would be waiting for me somewhere in a stroke of morbidity.
“When data is collected about real people and their lives, risks ranging from exposure to violence are always present” (Data Feminism), and yet we’re never truly given a choice to not share this data. Instead, despite knowing that our lives can be put into danger with the identities we put out online, we are still tracked, our data still kept and sold. Grindr keeps its location data for everyone, despite homosexuality being illegal in ⅓ of those countries, despite users turning the tracking off. 64% of LGBTQ+ people were harassed online, with most believing it is due to their sexual orientation, according to a report from GLAADS. The Galop reports that 60% of that population was threatened with physical violence.
9:15 pm. Laughing is my only option because it’s either that or a panic attack. I can’t tell if it’s admirable or creepy that she still managed to track me down after two name changes and moving across the country. Probably both.
We often talk about the problem of the lack of representation in data sets in training algorithms. But what this fails to acknowledge is that algorithms mirror the values of the world we live in. Without qualitative efforts to protect these minorities, to work something out to mitigate the bias that the society still holds against us at large, nothing will change.
11 pm. With tired hands, it takes me five tries before I get to my password for that account. I look through my discovery tab, look at everything recommended to me in a space I once thought was a safe haven, and delete the account. On my main, I blocked her and deleted the thread.
February 18th, 2022, 3 am. It’s been four years. I’ve gone through another name change and moved continents. Of course, I never heard back about my report from Instagram or her again. I’d like to think I’m a little more accepting of who I am.
My last Instagram post was a group photo from 2019.
