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By Melanie Lefkowitz |
Mobile phone dating apps that enable users to filter their queries by competition – or depend on algorithms that pair up folks of the same race – reinforce racial divisions and biases, relating to a brand new paper by Cornell researchers.
The authors said as more and more relationships begin online, dating and hookup apps should discourage discrimination by offering users categories other than race and ethnicity to describe themselves, posting inclusive community messages, and writing algorithms that don’t discriminate.
“Serendipity is lost when anyone have the ability to filter other individuals away, ” said Jevan Hutson ‘16, M.P.S. ’17, lead composer of “Debiasing Desire: Addressing Bias and Discrimination on Intimate Platforms, ” co-written with Jessie G. Taft ’12, M.P.S. ’18, an investigation coordinator at Cornell Tech, and Solon Barocas and Karen Levy, associate professors of data science. “Dating platforms are able to disrupt specific structures that are social however you lose those advantages when you’ve got design features that enable one to eliminate folks who are unique of you. ”
The paper, that your writers can have in the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing on Nov. 6, cites current research on discrimination in dating apps to demonstrate just how easy design choices could decrease bias against folks of all marginalized groups, including disabled or transgender individuals. Although partner choices are incredibly individual, the writers argue that tradition shapes our preferences, and dating apps influence our choices. Continue reading
