"Long before social media feeds or targeted ads, my mother used to say that life tends to show you the thing you're looking for. Or the thing you're afraid of. Or the thing you keep insisting you don't want. If you were trying to get pregnant, suddenly everyone around you was pregnant. If you wanted out of your relationship, magazines on the grocery store rack were filled with tips on "spicing up your marriage." If you were single, you noticed couples everywhere."
"But today, that feeling is no longer just in our heads - it's computational, built into the systems we use every day. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Google don't just reflect what we notice; they actively infer who we are and what comes next, based on demographics such as age and gender, as well as behavioral patterns. And once they decide what life stage you're in, they keep showing it to you, whether it fits or not."
"Across social platforms, users describe being quietly ushered through a narrow, linear life script, one that often resembles something like dating → engagement → wedding → pregnancy → parenting. These systems assume users are progressing along an expected trajectory. When lives diverge from that path, for instance, after a breakup, during infertility, following divorce, or by choice, the algorithm often fails to recalibrate."
Algorithms on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Google infer users' life stages from demographics and behavioral patterns. These systems amplify content aligned with an inferred trajectory, repeatedly showing content that matches assumed stages such as dating, engagement, wedding, pregnancy, and parenting. The inference can lock a user into a narrow, linear life script and fails to recalibrate when lives diverge after breakup, infertility, divorce, or by deliberate choice. Users continue to encounter unwanted or mismatched content even after changes. The result is a computational version of identity that remains static, making it difficult for users to escape imposed life-phase categorizations.
Read at Mashable
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