Twitter uses an algorithm to figure out your gender

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Is this article a paid advertisement?

No. Oh god, please, criticism is fine, but that one is so very dumb.

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I moved a post to an existing topic: Corections

I worry when they link up this to their Drones and start gender reassignment based on algorithm results.

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This solves a problem for me. Now all I have to do is sign up for a twitter account, spend a few months tweeting, create a dummy account to follow and the. Check to see what twitter has found out!

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Of course what MATTERS isn’t how well their predictions correlate with your actual biology, or how you present yourself, but your shopping choices. The goal is that if you shop like a man it will identify you as male and if you shop like a woman it will identify you as female. I wonder how well THAT correlation works.

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A paid advertisement for…the concept of gender identity?

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How does Twitter know how you shop? Or you mean more generally? Also, none of the research that appears to inform this integrates that sort of behavior, but I can imagine Twitter, if it could, would.

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Ads…people who buy ads care how you shop, and therefore people who sell ads or information about you to people who sell ads care.

Twitter admits 8.5% of its active users are bots, with outside sources saying that figure is at least to 35%. Over 50% of followers on the most active accounts are reported to be bots (via a quick google). So my question is: are bots detected as male or female?

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It seems to me that there are quite a few possible reasons a particular user’s followers might skew off what they might expect. It could be that Twitter’s algorithm isn’t as accurate as they say it is. It could be that it is as accurate as they say it is overall, but the followers of a particular person might be more likely to fall into a group that is misidentified in one direction. I bet a lot of people follow those they don’t agree with.

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I heard about this one person who walked like a woman and shopped like a man.

On a side note somehow this fixed my problems with vimeo not liking me (technology is strange)

http://vimeo.com/36053364

Anyway I guess i should get my wife to turn this on so I can figure out my gender.

Ask the Bots. I am certain they would know.

On another note, I just went and checked Twitter Analytics. Having a 76%M/24%F follower split just kind of made me feel a little dirty on the inside. =(

In the article you state that you use Twitter! Use of a product is also an implicit endorsement of it, no matter if we want to admit it. It is not us vs. them. It is a group process. To build a better form of social media requires change. It is also a well known trope that one way to affect change in a capitalist system is to stop the flow of capital. In my own life I have discontinued use of technology that uses similarly invasive methods to garner personal information that is converted by advertisers into money. Google, Twitter, Ebay, Amazon, are all companies that disseminate and sell our individual information to advertisers. Gender is just another classification system utilizied for motives of gain and profit. Be it gender, socioeconomic status, or whatever ways algorithms define us as people, it all still takes our participation to perpetuate the process that is highlighted within your article about the specifics of technologic gender catagorization.

Do you reply to every article that mentions Twitter on the Internet? This is what I mean about hijacking. You have an axe to grind, but it’s not contextually appropriate here. I mean, literally, you would have to reply to every article on Twitter everywhere if this is your plan.

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Yea, I got yer algorithm right here in my pants.

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So it follows that Twitter are paying for that comment? That is seriously the most stupid fucking thing I’ve heard all morning.

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