What would life be like if I could be a woman for one day? With certainty I can say many men have been wondering about this question for at least once in their lifetime. Now mom, please don’t worry, I am not planning to dress up like a woman in public any time soon, neither I have aspirations of becoming a transgender. But I will certainly experience what it will feels like to be a woman, in a digital sense.

By the means of an experiment I want to find out how fast the Facebook algorithm will respond if I will perform lady-like behavior. This holds that I will like pages that are generally liked by women, turn off Ad-block, and check what kinds of advertisements I get exposed to and which pages will be suggested by the Facebook algorithm.

First I will perform this experiment as just being me but eventually I will take this a step further by changing my gender into female in my profile settings. By comparison then I can discover whether the Facebook algorithm can be fooled. My assumption here is that regardless of my gender settings the Facebook algorithm will still know that I am in effect a male. This assumption is based on my expectation that the Facebook algorithm takes face recognition data into account when determining a persons gender.

Not sure if I am ready for this, but here I go!

By liking lady-like pages it seemed as if the Facebook algorithm gives you exactly what you ‘Like’, irrespective of your gender as made clear by the lady-like post that immediately appeared into my News Feed when my gender settings were still set on male. Also the pages that were recommended to me immediately changed as I acted as if I was interested in things women would normally be interested in.

But when I switched between gender settings the algorithm immediately started to feed me with posts that can be defined as of being to general interest to males. This shows that the Facebook algorithm does take gender settings into account when deciding what kinds of information one gets exposed to. So can the algorithm be fooled? I cannot say for sure because I did not test every aspect possible in order to be conclusive about this. But by feeding me immediately with male-like posts when switching between gender settings I suppose the algorithm cannot be fooled. Also by ‘feeding’ my News Feed with woman-like posts when my gender settings were still set on male makes me think that the algorithm does not take face recognition information into account when deciding what one gets exposed to.

In boyd’s article she speaks about youth going online and participating in networked publics to experience a kind of freedom. This made me think of whether the freedom boyd speaks about is a different one than the kind in real-life? And if the types of freedom are different, do they intertwine? The internet is a place where you theoretically can be completely yourself but as the text message of my friend showed, change of online behavior will immediately be noticed and evoke reactions as if there exists some real social norms on the Internet much like in the real world. What if I as a male would genuinely be interested women-like things, be explicit about it on social media, and get negative reactions on my online behavior in return, can one then still define the Internet as a place where one can experience a different kind of freedom? Or are the same social norms at work as in real-life?