Camila Souza Araújo, Wagner Meira, Virgilio Almeida
Stereotyping can be viewed as oversimplified ideas about social groups. They can be positive, neutral or negative. The main goal of this paper is to identify stereotypes for female physical attractiveness in images available in the Web. We look at the search engines as possible sources of stereotypes. We conducted experiments on Google and Bing by querying the search engines for beautiful and ugly women. We then collect images and extract information of faces. We propose a methodology and apply it to analyze photos gathered from search engines to understand how race and age manifest in the observed stereotypes and how they vary according to countries and regions. Our findings demonstrate the existence of stereotypes for female physical attractiveness, in particular negative stereotypes about black women and positive stereotypes about white women in terms of beauty. We also found negative stereotypes associated with older women in terms of physical attractiveness. Finally, we have identified patterns of stereotypes that are common to groups of countries.
Camila Souza Araujo, Gabriel Magno, Wagner Meira, Virgilio Almeida, Pedro Hartung, Danilo Doneda
Online video services, messaging systems, games and social media services are tremendously popular among young people and children in many countries. Most of the digital services offered on the internet are advertising funded, which makes advertising ubiquitous in children's everyday life. To understand the impact of advertising-based digital services on children, we study the collective behavior of users of YouTube for kids channels and present the demographics of a large number of users. We collected data from 12,848 videos from 17 channels in US and UK and 24 channels in Brazil. The channels in English have been viewed more than 37 billion times. We also collected more than 14 million comments made by users. Based on a combination of text-analysis and face recognition tools, we show the presence of racial and gender biases in our large sample of users. We also identify children actively using YouTube, although the minimum age for using the service is 13 years in most countries. We provide comparisons of user behavior among the three countries, which represent large user populations in the global North and the global South.
Gabriel Magno, Camila Souza Araújo, Wagner Meira, Virgilio Almeida
The internet has been blurring the lines between local and global cultures, affecting in different ways the perception of people about themselves and others. In the global context of the internet, search engine platforms are a key mediator between individuals and information. In this paper, we examine the local and global impact of the internet on the formation of female physical attractiveness stereotypes in search engine results. By investigating datasets of images collected from two major search engines in 42 countries, we identify a significant fraction of replicated images. We find that common images are clustered around countries with the same language. We also show that existence of common images among countries is practically eliminated when the queries are limited to local sites. In summary, we show evidence that results from search engines are biased towards the language used to query the system, which leads to certain attractiveness stereotypes that are often quite different from the majority of the female population of the country.