Taobao is currently the largest e-commerce website in China and can also be seen as a social media for shopping. Taobao has the characteristics of traditional social media, allowing users to share links of products, comment on their shopping experiences, bookmark favourite products, follow favourite shops and add friends. On the other hand, selling products live and showing the experience of using products through short videos has become more and more common on Taobao, giving it the atmosphere of traditional social media.
One of the essential functions of Taobao is the personalised recommendation. The personalised recommendations on Taobao suggested products that I might be interested in based on keywords from my most recent purchases. However, in my experience, Taobao gives me recommendations based on my search terms and based on users’ search results with the same characteristics as mine, which leads to the recommendations is the system thinks I would be interested in. For example, I haven’t searched for anything related to cosmetics for a month, but Taobao’s personalised recommendations still keep sending me lipstick and foundation. Another friend of mine also said she had never searched for boots but had received frequent recommendations about them.
On the other hand, these recommendations usually attract consumers with such slogans as “How females have delicate lifestyles”, “How to be a classy girl by shopping”, “Luxury goods to boost your confidence”, “Use this lipstick and men will fall in love with you”. etc. These advertisements and review articles are all over Taobao, virally style to infect female consumers. The content of these ads tried to convey that women are not perfect as long as they do not pay for these products, thus attracting female consumers to pay for beauty. However, the essence of these ads is the conviction that women still have to create value, gain attention and benefit by looking good and elegant, which remind me of the objectified women. But few people can resist this temptation, sometimes including myself.
Taobao’s algorithms played a vital role in the mechanisms of personalised recommendations. First, the algorithm summarises the products that users are likely to be interested in by their search keywords. In sorting gender personalisation, it is necessary to calculate the gender of the product and the users separately, then analyse whether it is gender-related and does not indicate gender needs. In other words, the algorithms aim to present products with the same gender as the user in advance so that users of different genders can see different sorting effects when searching for the exact keywords. However, at the same time, the highly generalised algorithm also solidifies the perception of gender, leading to a tendency for all female users to arrive at similar algorithmic content.
In addition, the keyword search mechanism of algorithmic recommendations triggers various perceptions about gender stereotypes and objectify women. Advertising on Taobao primarily traffics in women’s anxiety about beauty, so many keywords are very unfriendly to women, such as being white as snow, slim as a flash, wearing this skirt, and having a small waist in a second. When a keyword has been highly discussed recently, it frequently appears in the various short videos posted by Taobao influencers; this is the only way the algorithm will prioritise the videos they post. Furthermore, due to the various advertising for feminine products, the standard of beauty also be solidified. Female consumers receive the single standard against beauty. Every time they open the Taobao, they might be brainwashed by the messages over time, which could be regarded as a representation of the patriarchy under consumerism.
To sum up, when users search for products, they are recommended videos and ads containing disrespectful messages about women, flooding each user’s platform with anti-feminism content and objectifying women because the algorithm tends to recommend ‘keywords’ instead of ‘information’.
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