welcome to the documentary from the bbc world service where we report the world however difficult the issue however hard to reach podcast the bbc world service i supported by advertising whether this is a cheque from carvalho i just love my car to them i went online and corona gave me an offer right away then they just picked up the car and gave me this lots of british shook obviously could put this torture next car or we could finally get their jacuzzi or i could start taking tuba lessons or i quit my job and write my memoirs or i can put it towards my next car with carlotta sorry your check not might sell your cards carlotta visit carbonic outcome or download the up to get a real offer in seconds i was what in a coffee shop in boston to like help pay

while i was training for the trials and so people kept jogging they like oh yeah she just took a two hour coffee break and went in randal trials bear that i hold you in his back with more libyans and primarily means sharing their journeys to the term on the podium from the bbc world service listen now whenever you get your bbc pulled coasts welcome to the documentary from the bbc world service with me any house i am asking didn't next no i was gay before i did how does big tech purse isolation work and what does that mean oh gee bt key people around the world tell you about my coming out story coming out to myself the year i realized i was bisexual it was second year of university i've had one long term boyfriend before then and always concern

myself straight to be honest dating wasn the top of my agenda my priorities studying training with my units team and going out with friends i also watched a lot of netflix and i love what it recommended when go into the website or up your met with a sleek page with rose and rows of suggestive films or tv shows every row has a little time to telling you what it's about i'm still log onto my account now to show some examples ok as a top picks for early row tv is based on real life critically aimed witty tv dramas romantic films award winning tv programmes that year i remember getting lots of recommendations for new series with lesbian storylines all by characters there was one the stuck out could you me her all about up

the amorous queer relationship mom dad i'm a conceptually challenged bisexual i like boys girls another was gypsy i could featuring a suburban mum and has sorted affair with a young woman i been with a woman he must have had crashes really that way for me always into men everyone must be seeing these shows on their feet i thought but when i mention two friends people who had just like me with similar interests am streaming histories nobody knew what i was talking about cut to six later i myself two to realize that i was in fact a bisexual woman and it felt like netflix had worked it out before me it wasn't just netflix ice

its similar recommendations on loads of the big tech platforms are used regularly spy the fire started really pushing a playlists that became one of my favorites full of slow melancholic pop like phoebe bridge and learn adele re after months streaming it i read the description specify had given the playlist suffolk songs that defines your music taste as yearning it's not even the songs i was recommended attacked suffolk a word women who love women this seems to be a common experience for queer people have come across tons of oscar with headlines like tik tok thinks i'm gay how could it know before i knew or facebook knew i was guy before my family did your surrounded by recommending systems almost everywhere in your daily life marcel

of ski is a data scientists working in recommended systems or breakfast to those in the no so if you search for new products or want to buy something on e commerce platforms like amazon or if you are searching for new job on linked in all these different platforms they all work with recommend our systems the basic concept is making predictions what do we think he might based on what we know about you but now you and come up with very differently personalized passions of it one method looks at the cons of what is being recommended just watched inaction film so here's another one but i might have off recommending you are wrong com for a while i'm not ready if i'd much about you my focus understanding the movies their themes as cost collaborative food is that say the other great direction collaborative filtering here's where things

to get a little more complicated it exploits patterns of user behaviour how have users so watchers or listeners or readers interacted with items so songs playlists articles movies for example so it's like if we were going to a market and bind fruit there and i do have let's say banana and airports in my basket and you do have bananas and oranges or paris in your basket so we have bananas in common because our and your and my basket so maybe what i have in addition might be interesting for you and vice versa this method doesn't just say you fought bananas before so i recommend you other fruits similar content it says he fought bananas before and so has this other person that's a pattern

what else today like that you might enjoy too most of the platforms we use every day have combined these two methods they say they want to show people things that they will enjoy or be interested in and this is how do it he's taught gallon former netflix vip of product innovation talking about recommendations in a video for the future of storytelling going back years go we decided we figure out everything possibly would you think of that you can tag a movie or tv show with to really get underneath the storing that's the content bit sorted now for information about the people watching so behavioral data implicit data what they watch how much they watch what devices they watch we try to figure out what are the tags and manner understood in this balance that's up to the sophistical algorithms tat bridge what we know about the user and what we know about the content i

this is why explanations usually stop but it still doesn't feel like enough these sophisticated algorithm was predicted that i would enjoy movies and tv series tact as algae bt q why thanks to uk data privacy laws i was well to download all the information that the big tech companies have on me and i was amazed by how much detail was their facebook catalyst of the websites i'd visited i've been labelled with certain interests mainly dogs and rugby and one platform even had the coordinates to my home address but none of them said that they tact anything to do with my sexuality so actually it's hard for me

systems to learn that explicitly if they dont have access to the actual label and of course there are justifiable ethical concerns of not doing so explicitly but for example of pipe do like to see more of algae bt content then the platform makes a good job in inferring that i associate myself as a member of the attributes community or that i am an ally or whatever and owing to show me more of that content so to say it is not really portent to know whether a person is gay ass or whatever it is important to understand whether a person is interested in gay or lesbian content this is a point that most of the companies have made to me it doesn't matter the them what you're saying as he is they care about what you

just in seeing your tastes and preferences rather than your identity but does not make much of a difference in reality earlier this year journalists at the wall street journal investigated how tik tok kept track of its users who watched content tact algae bt he's one of the journalists george orwell's speaking about it's on the generals tech podcast for the algerian cost her former tik tok employs a viewed as a list of the aps gay users tik tok has said that the dashboard employees used to access this data has been deleted and that it has the names of these closers and replace them with numbers spokeswoman said that tiktok doesn't identify potentially sensitive information such as sexual orientation based on more vigils watch and it doesnt info his details either in all of these texts who conversations about tags and algorithms sometimes the reality

people using these platforms can get lost in my country you can't really be one hundred per cent yourself you you have to hide some of where you are only specific number of people in your life what parts of yourself are you hiding best color as a message shall it be in uganda is a love for me to hide may this year the ugandan government passed one of the harshest anti gables in the world anyway convicted of homosexual acts faces life in prison and even the death penalty in some so called aggravated cases in a statement do uganda my commission said that no has been discriminated upon based on their sexual orientation but doesn't condone the delay promotion of sexual orientation of any kind

is a ugandan politician speaking in parliament when the bill was approved we are going to enforce the law enforcement russia to make sure that homosexuals have both in your gun for their safety we change the names of everyone we talked in uganda and they were it's a spoken by actors this is zack on mama flakes i enjoy a lot of series most especially lgbtq series because from them i feel like i can see other people that are living their truth is this stuff that is recommended you buy netflix all do use kind of search out yourself or is it by recommendation by friends of frankie started with me searching for one that operably saw on my tic toc there is one called pause i'd love to watch that pose is a fabulous show about the queer ball scene and eighties new york so i think what he tries is if

well she posts here's some recommendations and then all the other conditions that would come up on lgbt and yeah you kind of just find yourself digging a hole with a shovel by watching more and more and then netflix recommending more and more a show my country my sisters and my friend a near scares me because i know for sure that if they ever looked through what i'm watching they'll probably just snakes echo what must surely is is unless the scared to me is a very big scared me zack story got me wondering is a post that your recommendations can out she has this actually happened i called up is a lesbian journalist based in kampala to do some digging this is a fascinating investigation and not some i'd come across before but what we started asking questions about this within the community it wasn't long before i met good

and i've known for eighteen years so what do you do for fun i like dancing like nothing i'm a party animal at the tick tock from a socialite is that your favorite social media yeah it's my favorite because it's where i express myself i feel free when a monty you're in uganda but if you like your software in uk or america there's this guy called james brown from i think from california yeah tiktok would always bring me his content how to do make up blah blah blah darling i'm geometrical myself to the blend black that goes further than another one my kill he's like a drag queen he's a vibe i work that's what

well let's go ladies the regale period tick tock recommends good videos gave videos it would just bring on my for you page gay content without even typing in asking for anything gay did you ever tell tick tock that you are gay no i never told tick took i never told him because even in my bio there's nothing that says i'm gay there's no but digital brings it up not only tick tock but even instagram it came when they were signing the anti gay bill in uganda you know tiktok used to bring videos like when the people were going into court so i would listen and my auntie i lived with my auntie would say comments like why are you listening about energy bt

no no no i was just growling and tiktok you know tiktok brings random things and then she's like i wish all the gay people were killed i hate gay people and then what happens next after she saw these videos she had the videos but she didn't have proof time gay so i was in the bedroom you know when you charging your phone but you want to talk like schooling videos my aunt calls me in the sitting room send me to buy some groceries from the supermarket i forgot my phone behind unlocked i think

maybe it was set up after thirty minutes i came back i found her with my phone very furious very furious as if someone had died then she asked me why are you gay she says don't lie to me i know everything i went through your phone i see what you watch i see your tiktok gay people in your comments unlike ok i'm gay but i'm not getting any one and she said you can't live with me you will influence my kids to become gay you're a devil your was even than a devil then afterwards he called my dead so my dad just said is it true he was like don't come back here

i dare come back i'll kill you myself i'll take you to the police then that night my aunt threw me out of the house i couldn't handle it i remember was like god what i think i have nothing left on this earth robert was taken in for a while by a friend but he remained vulnerable as a queer ugandan it is alarming to think that we may be at risk simply for consume el gb q content on such a media when the until what sexuality act was passed into law many queer people went back into show media close it for example some fled what's groups where associated with fellow algae bt q people back story suggests may be

there is no social media close it not in the world of big tech i am greg's rocco garcia i'm a phd student at the university of cambridge and i specialize in computational social cycle i told you my story and as i said it it kind of felt like netflix the eye was gay even before i did it is is that possible yes it's interesting is that netflix his privacy page but it doesn't use demographic characteristics as part of its production so in that sense no one is expert we tying netflix that their gay and even if they did they should be used in predictions netflix is we express it about that as our own social media and streaming companies they told me that won't you watched and how you ve interacted with the ep is a better indication of taste things like age or gender but what they can do

who is look at users that have likes quoting quote queer content netflix problem as a bunch of algorithms that can go framed by frame and say this is what in this room the themes that arise from the transcripts all this meditated arms like this unique fingerprint that you can use to draw connections between different content and maybe some of those features are not even perceivable to us because their derived without human involves there so you can just be like a hotchpotch of you know that after the length of the series color is in the video and ethics he's gone in and obviously advocated this content as where content you can have a reasonable gas that you know people likeness i intend to be quiet now it's not going to be like a super one hundred air airtight prediction because you can have people who are not queer with this content really like it does allow platforms like networks to if they want

to find that sort of user base without explicitly asking its users in our world sexuality is by what kind of dig deeper into that because for me i wasn't watching particularly queer content yet still was getting a lot of those recommendations what sort of thing what might have been giving that might have indeed it did not when i myself didn't even realize so the possibilities is that there are some red other shows out thereabout like engagement with their shows correlates with engagement with the lgbtq content there is also just this entire constellation of non content based data that can be used to make these predictions so maybe it literally the percentage of time instead continuously watching weather you go through the credits

are you skip around like within these episodes all these are like really tiny very specific features that all like don't really mean anything but like if you take them as part of this larger consulate of data yet you can make really specific predictions gregg told me about some spotify research which laid bare the power of this on the surface meaningless behavioral data the study looking at the link between personality trades and musical preferences can see that the top predictors for these personality traits which you can place with any other demographic characteristic honestly as its psychological trade the things that were slightly to predict these personality traits we're not just two with the music people streamed factors like john or the mood of a song but things like weather these are how to premium account whether or not they shameful windows does windows desktop let's see openness one of the two

variables is percentage of streams with high instrumental nests values so this is saying that spotify can predict whether someone is open minded or imaginative based on how much they listen to songs without vocals whatever the genre and if we were to apply it to the netflix case that we ve been kind of talking about sure it might not be what i watched it might be when i watched it and how i watched it and which device i watching it on when and for how long that actually indy hated more about my interest in bisexual lesbian storylines than yet the content i was watching the air in a statement spot if i said it's algorithms don't predictions about sexual orientation based on a uses listening preferences so well does that mean for the algae bt q community worldwide this means that a lot of play where it's not safe to be queer queer people are in danger because

any government depending on regulatory rules can request this information for any reason obeyed see fit right it's really really scary my name is punishment touch and i'm a journalist based in turkey and also quadrant the media law studies association the state has been very authoritarian for some time grazing was so kind spin wanted to bring all the social media under control so aside this very determined to pressure all the big tech company to comply with its censorship request in october twins twenty two the turkish state ass new legislation aimed at tackling distant formation and it gave the internet regulator greater powers the most the thing is it a criminalize us for the first time disseminating misleading information to the public it also it introduces even stricter government control over these social media platforms for them

they are now facing huge fines if they don't our representative office in the country or if they refused in a comply with government requests and you talk a lot about censorship and i know that that is what this twenty twenty two disinformation law what it's really been criticized for but there is also a clause within it that is a little bit more about surveillance could you tell me a little bit about that so it actually imposes huge fines to companies which basically i want to share user data but he also face gradual reduction of bandwidth which throttling so this is actually being banned because throttling is people can use it that's very close and access ban and the end of the day the turkish ambassador in london told me that the law is part of its campaign against disinformation and that unrestricted public access to truth an accurate information is an essential human right all these social media companies are expected to grow

any data almost all of it to the state in case you know the turkish government nor accord us for such is data thing that a social media company if you use tracks any kind of user data including your look location data what you're into what your research and how much of your data is being tracked by an app is actually a big question and it threatens a lot of work into it isn't different ways not that you know he's tech companies evil or is just how the system as a single judge more data you track the bigger the risk of exposing a person but a country like turkey were the elevator community come under attack recently since two thousand in the norman has not allowed pride parades in istanbul and it has they stepped up entire ultimately rhetoric on different levels in a homosexuality isn't illegal in turkey but what you are saying is that outside of the law there is still a kind of crack down on that community exactly so i think there is

crazed risk associated with their would these apps tracking storing more of our data how likely all the big tech companies like tik tok or twitter to over people's user data in these companies upright companies do they have to so i think the social the companies they always are looking for me like a line where there are still able to operate ends people kind of use then platforms but also try to anger authorities most social media companies publish transparency reports which include information about how many governments and law enforcement requests they get in different countries and how often they comply these companies say that they review each request on a case by case basis and only davy user information if there are valid reasons in the second of last year there was a significant in the number of requests for user data from turkish authorised

he's on acts like tiktok and twitter information law was passed in the same period not only whether more requests for this data but tik tok was more likely and over the information it does it's no use data between january and june twenty twenty two but complied with dean percent of turkey's legal requests and a third of what it calls emergency requests between july and december that gay tiktok there are some situations where it will hand over user information without legal process when it if necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury it also says that there was an overall increase in request last year across the world which it thinks was due to from grace and it can is human rights impact in all of these requests twitter stop publishing this information since the take over of new c o elon musk but an hour

this by the tec publication rest of world showed that since october twenty twenty two turkey has sent the most requests out of any in tree asking twitter to either handover user data or take down posts and it complied with the majority of them i don't know how much information they villa provide us because these where's reports really doin that they never end information about what user request or what kind of content take down was spent they asked for so we don't even know what they complied with speaking to sack and robert in uganda and other queer people that i've met this documentary that conflicted on the one hand they love what their recommended on these sites maybe they even see as liberating but on the other hand they're worried like an intrusion of our privacy some point it will be good intrusion of your previous because slate

this is something you don't usual experience or you know is giving a little bit of more knowledge of what your life would be if he touches it be free and the feeling is beautiful alleys good but i dont know from making any sense at some point very unsafe to really scare to beat you ve been listed in the documentary from the bbc world service the producer and presented was me ellie house the editor with china collins with sound design by james bed

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