Gender stereotypes in TikTok and Instagram: a reverse engineering experiment for understanding the mechanisms of social network algorithms ; Estereotipos de género en TikTok e Instagram: un experimento de ingeniería inversa para entender los mecanismos de los algoritmos de las redes sociales

In the context of immersion of digital content during the Covid-19 pandemic, the popularization of algorithmicmechanisms for curating information in everyday life was evident. This article presents the observationsof a reverse engineering experiment carried out at PUCRS (Brazil) in which evidence of the reinforcement (ornot) of gender stereotypes in social networks was sought. For this, accounts were created on the TikTok and Instagram apps, one identified with male pronouns, the other with female pronouns. The study was divided into phases in which the levels of interaction with the content of the applications were changed so that it was possible to analyze the transformations in the recommended videos to identify clues to the mechanism used by the platform. Finally, it was possible to observe differences between the content suggested for each profile thatmay be related to gender stereotypes and differences in quality and popular topics in each application. It wasalso possible to perceive which actions seemed to have more interference in the recommendations and whichtype of content or interaction was prioritized for each network. This study does not intend to end the discussionson how social networks operate but to bring new questions and reflections on the parameters used by their logic and the possible positive and negative effects of these recommendations in different social contexts. ; En el contexto de la inmersión de los contenidos digitales durante la pandemia del Covid-19, se hizoevidente la popularización de los mecanismos algorítmicos de curaduría contenidos en la vida cotidiana.Este artículo presenta las observaciones de un experimento de ingeniería inversa realizado en la PUCRS (Brasil) en el que se buscó evidencia del refuerzo (o no) de los estereotipos de género en las redes sociales. Para ello, se crearon cuentas en las aplicaciones TikTok e Instagram, una identificada con pronombresmasculinos y otra con pronombres femeninos. El estudio se dividió en fases en las que se cambiaronlos niveles de ...