If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.
I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.
And yet some politicians say the solution is to ban 15 year olds from social media, rather than police the platforms, algorithms and users. Please contact your representative and ask them to police the platforms, not bring in creepy ID checks.
Never understood how the solution to all platforms going to shit is making users upload their ID. This does neither fix the problem nor the symptom. I mean, I understand why it's done but not how people come to think this is a good idea.
ID laws are about control. If you can't post anonymously the govt can track people who don't agree with them. Or LGBTQ+ people, or whoever the govt doesn't like.
They are the same people who think "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide. Only bad people need/want anonymity." They are also either childless or don't care about their child's online access and activity.
I think these people should live in a world without bathroom doors.
A good nearly half of people use authoritarian thinking rather than have to put in effort to think for themselves even slightly.
Sheeple
Screenshot of this Mastodon toot, because I can't get newlines to work in quoted-text.
To a certain degree I agree with the assessment - children (under-16 would be my definition here) shouldn't have full access to what we consider social media today.
Things were different 10, 20 years ago when it wasn't so centralised. You'd have independent forums, all with reliable moderation, and so on, plus with little to no ads, and the ad networks themselves were more inclined to not have inappropriate things shown, especially to children - basically all the "make your dick grow 7 foot long" and "8 cock hungry MILFs waiting for you in your area" type of ads were all relegated to porn sites to begin with.
Today? We have centralised social media with little to no moderation beyond basic keyword filtering, ad networks not giving a fuck about the content they push, and every single malicious actor having access to these platforms to further their agendas... Not to mention unfettered access to children by any and all accounts.
What IMO would be the best solution is to force social media sites to have a cordoned off "children" section where kids can socialise with their peers without predatory adults having any form of access to them. But that's easier said than done, unfortunately.
I mean, old forums were pretty messed up.
Your point stands though. The old internet isn't what the average person experiences, anymore.
In real life, we call this school!
It can definitely be done. It's not difficult, it's just that the world is not heading in that direction.
School is not about socialization. Socialization absolutely happens there, but it's not the primary purpose, and it does not exclude predatory adults. See: the rampant rates of bullying and violence that occur, and get further enabled by faculty who either ignore complaints or both-sides it into victim-blaming.
Kids are not just naturally nice to one-another.Lord of the Flies is still taught in schools for a reason.
No, but it’s still a more isolated environment. There aren’t bunch of ads or grifters or whatever on campus because it at least tries to insulate kids from the outside world profiting off them, and to curate what they experience.
That’s what they need on their phones, too. Lord of the Flies is better than Big Brother.
I guess the difficult part would be to blunt the outside from flooding in, like kids mass reposting Andrew Tate. But at least there would be some control/fairness with exposure, instead of an engagement algorithm ruling their feed.
Lord of the Flies is fiction. It is taught for its artistic merit, not its applicability to the real world.
The whole point of the algorithm is attention. Yeah, they could try to actually police it so coded versions of “kill yourself, ugly bitch” don’t spread, but that language works, and it makes the posters rich.
You can’t get around for “addiction for ad dollars” being the whole point. It’s always going to surface ragebait, trash talk or whatever because that’s what sells attention, no matter how hard it’s fought.
…So yeah. Policing isnt going to do anything. Don’t tell your representatives something that won’t work, and worse, has the “theatre” of helping.
I don’t know a good “solution” other than burning it all to the ground, but honestly, banning as many people as possible sounds like a good idea to me.
Yes you can.
Why do you think going after the haters, taking their riches away, booting them offline and possibly imprisoning some of the worst, plus going after the operators of platform that spread hate "isn't going to do anything"? We're at the point now where there's so much hate that it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel at first.
No thanks. The beauty of social media is the unrestrained assholery. People just need to learn to cope & quit being fragile: skill issue. Education & civic campaigns to promote social good are better approaches respecting our inherent liberties to piss people off.
How much do you think it'd cost to 'police the platforms'?
Less than it's costing us in lives and damage not to police them!
lemmy is only took off because reddit policed it and kicked most of the users here off.
the problem with policing speech and bullying is it's totally subjective. i used to be told I was a bully for offering people writing suggestions.
Other waves arrived here because reddit kicked all the independent apps off, and started feeding all community discussions to AI.
How do you police someone you can't identify?
By closing the accounts? Facebook doesn't need to know who you are in real life to ban you.
Why would Facebook want to have less users?
It wouldn't. That's why have to ask politicians to make laws that forces Facebook to do it anyway.
Facebook has a certain level of moderation, as is required by a lot of countries.
But they're never going to, for example, screen every comment before it gets posted. And politicians basically banning Facebook don't get many votes
Where that level of moderation is negligible and ineffective. It's a sham.
How do we know? Who's tried it? They're all scared that facebook will start working against them, as it allegedly has in some referendums and elections.
🤣🤣🤣 No. There's loads of "promoted" posts in your feed for years now.
I very highly doubt the majority of dudes posting shit like that even use a vpn. Therefore they can be ifentified by IP.
Hell the worst shit you see on Facebook is by people posting under their actual name.
They think it's now acceptable.