A new study found that searching for value neutral words, such as "boss", "veiled," and "tight" on Naver shows sexually objectified female images. Even when the words do not describe a group of women or their bodies, the search results show photos of women that are highly revealing or emphasize certain body parts. The researchers pointed out that this is the result of a culture that voyeuristically consumes images of women's bodies, combined with algorithms to reproduce them.

According to the academic community on August 8, Yoon Ho-young, an assistant professor of communication and media at Ewha Womans University, and Jin Bo-rae, an associate professor of media communication at Jungbu University, submitted a paper to the Korean Women's Communication Association on June 30 titled, "Search the image of the boss on Naver, where are the user preferences?: Production, distribution and consumption of sexualized images."

The researchers selected "boss," "veiled," and "tight" as value neutral words and analyzed the photos that appear when searching those words on Naver. To compare with the results of the value-neutral words, they also searched the words that describe body parts, such as "bulging," "backside" and "voluptuous" and the words referring to female in the male-centered community, such as "new town missy" and "ordinary single lady."

As the maximum number of photos shown in Naver's search results is limited to 500, the researchers collected the URLs of 500 photos per query and the tags used in the search. To exclude personal preferences from being reflected in the search results, they collected data after newly installing a browser and deleting all browsing history, including internet cookies.

The results showed that about 32 percent of the images collected for "boss," 69 percent for "veiled," and 66 percent for "tight" emphasized female sexual characteristics.

When analyzing the sources of sexualized images, Naver blogs and online cafes accounted for a high proportion. 37.7 percent of the search results for "boss," 32.4 percent for "veiled," and 49.1 percent for "tight" were from Naver blogs and cafes. The researchers concluded that "the photos on the search result pages for the eight words are consistently of young women who are topless, in sexual positions, or have certain body parts emphasized, as if they were search results for the same word."

This can be explained by the fact that the keywords show the results of collective and generalized preferences. This means that Naver's search engine judges that its users want it to show them sexualized photos. The fact that users of Naver searched for "boss" and then consistently selected and viewed sexualized female body images suggests that the algorithm believes that showing such images for the search term "boss" is what the users want.

The researchers noted that users in portals and online communities, tag photos of sexualized women with value-neutral words, and this behavior, combined with algorithms, creates a distorted idea. "We need to think about whether personal deviance or bad plays of small groups, when aggregated and accumulated by digital technologies, falls outside the realm of regulation," the researchers said.