can't believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
1066 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
69702 readers
3226 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Facebook... now even more toxic than previously known!
That's 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It's in its sorce code
even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.
Ads? I can see no ads...
TIL teen girls still used Facebook.
Instagram too according to the article.
I get Instagram (lots of creative types there), Facebook is a bit surprising though.
Instagram is considered for old folks now???
Goddam I had to read that headline 3 times before I understood the implication!
That is outright disgusting, and such practices ought to be outlawed.
Or as Trump would say, very cool and very legal way to make money.
Happy I got AdNauseam after uBlock Origin. Deleted my facebook a year ago, shit is an AI slopfest built upon the greed and manipulation of every part of the chain. Defcon 31 has a good talk that brings this up. "Disenshittify or die" by Cory Doctrow, cann recommend to watch.
I support the use of AdNauseam. Not sure if there are any more extreme alternatives, I now choose to be actively hostile towards advertising/tracking rather than just passively blocking it.
My dad has been talking about wanting something like AdNauseam for years, i was very happy when i found it. The extra mile would probably be to expand it with a VPN and constantly spam clicks, clear cache, switch IP and obfuscate data. Now we just wait for someone with enough time to build it...
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
They shouldn't, but also PSA to any parents but modern parenting advice typically is to let your kids use social media if they choose, and guide them through the social and emotional difficulties with good communication. Don't blanket ban it because they'll just use it anyways without guidance, and be unprepared the moment they turn 18.
It's a case of: 99.9% of kids are smoking cigarettes so yours will too. Better to show them how to use a weekly cigar without inhaling, than just ban it which won't work.
That's sounds like blaming teens for the actions of the adults behind Facebook.
That's a fallacy. Teenagers are the victims here. So I'm obviously blaming greedy corporations, lack of good parenting and proper regulation from authorities.
So teens should be allowed to go anywhere adults make it dangerous because it's the adults' faults? I hope you don't have kids.
You will all make fine parents if you choose. Just slapping in some positivity and love here lol.
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it's also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Facebook actively contributed to the genocide in Myanmar, and did basically nothing about it because they didnt want to hire more moderators that spoke the language, so that they could adequately remove pro-genocidal content
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don't think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the "risk" of them trying to go around it. "Their" version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn't on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn't going to happen ...
How isn't it possible? Just don't give them phones, it's not that complicated
You can walk into any Walmart in America and buy a cheap smartphone for $30.
This approach is even less effective than "just don't give them drugs".
Ok, but you also need a data plan to go along w/ it (or regular visits to top up; is that still a thing?), plus hide it from parents, or you're going to have a bad time.
Drugs are a different story. You can often get drugs from friends (free to start), can buy them a little at a time, and you don't need to stash any at home. For a phone to be useful, it needs to be readily accessible, which means you'll have it with you everywhere.
It's possible, but it's going to take a fair amount of work to hide a phone from a parent who's paying even a little bit of attention.
The real problem here is parents. Parents need to step up and do a better job. Source: am a parent.
Look, maybe it's true that parents should be doing a better job here. The thing is, that's an individual solution. This is a systemic problem. How kids (and adults) interact socially and consume media is fundamentally changed over the last thirty years and we're going to have to find ways to adapt to that as a society.
Yeah, in any particular individual case you can probably come up with a list of things the parent could have done differently. The reality is that this is a problem for tens (hundreds?) of millions of parents.
You can hand wave away any problem that affects children with "parents should do a better job". It didn't work for obesity, it didn't work for child traffic deaths, it didn't work for fentanyl overdoses, it didn't work for school shootings, it didn't work for measles, and it's not going to work for this either.
I'm just going to copy/paste what I wrote in a previous comment in a similar thread:
Everybody is so quick to blame the parents in these situations. Maybe there is some truth to that, but people also need to reckon with the fact that kids (and adults) are being constantly inundated by Skinner box apps, and “platforms” full of engagement bait designed to be as addictive and attractive as possible. All run by corporations with functionally no regard for the safety of their users.
Yeah, sure, if you’re giving advice to an individual parent, they should probably be keeping a closer eye on what their kids are doing.
But there are systemic problems here that can’t be fixed with individual action. By laying the blame solely at the feet of the parents here, you are in effect putting individual parents up against dozens of huge corporations, each with armies of expert advertisers, designers, and psychologists working to build these products. It’s hardly a fair fight.
Prohibition never works; people will always find other bad — maybe even worse — things to do. The human pressure to have social interactions may lead to creating terrible IRL friendships, ones that can be much more dangerous.
Instead, I would strongly advise for honest, mature conversations about the risks that social media comes along with. This can lead to a highly positive impact, especially if you teach how to observe interactions between people through social media, even if not interacting, yourself.
Ok, when was the last time you saw a working payphone? 2010? It isn't safe for teens to not have a phone because payphones don't exist any more.
load more comments
(1 replies)
No one should
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
My doctor's office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a "happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!"-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it's just automated.
Uh that’s new doctor time
I'd call my former Dr's office and flip my shit. Them giving out your info may have been a HIPAA violation. You should really follow up and harass the fuck out of them.
Don't normalize this
load more comments
(1 replies)
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
load more comments
(9 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
Even though Luigi Mangione didn't actually commit any crime and his trial is a flimsy sham, I agree. He is the public face of whoever really did it, and they are an icon of justice.
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build a healthy social network.
Smaller communities can work, if they're well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.
Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.
So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.
Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
view more: next ›