Cornell Chronicle. Apps might also produce biases
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By Melanie Lefkowitz |
Cellphone dating apps that enable users to filter their queries by competition – or depend on algorithms that pair up individuals of the exact same race – reinforce racial divisions and biases, based on a brand new paper by Cornell scientists.
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 whenever individuals have the ability to filter other individuals away,” said Jevan Hutson вЂ16, M.P.S. ’17, lead composer of “Debiasing Desire: handling Bias and Discrimination on Intimate Platforms,” co-written with Jessie G. Taft ’12, M.P.S. ’18, a study coordinator at Cornell Tech, and Solon Barocas and Karen Levy, associate professors of data science. “Dating platforms are able to disrupt specific social structures, however you lose those advantages if you have design features that allow one to eliminate individuals who are diverse from you.”