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.
This isn’t realistic to tell a kid who uses social media, it’s like saying “Don’t play Xbox” or “Don’t watch new releases, only watch stuff that’s out on video already”
This isn’t a specific platform problem, it’s a social problem and needs social solutions. The solution we need the most involves a lot of tranquilizer darts and reeducation camps for about 28% of society broadly. That’s probably not going to be realistic, so the second best approach is the one that people are most adverse to trying, which is more active and involved parenting and reducing screen-time as a whole family.
I’m burning out seeing all this “social media on children” talk when it’s the adults’ relationship to social media that is causing the most widespread harm.
It is though. You think the spreading of this content is an accident? They could change the algorithm tomorrow and it would disappear, but they won’t because this division is useful to them.
I guess to elaborate on that point I will say that it’s not a specific platform problem, meaning all the naive Lemmykids here saying “move to fediverse and you won’t have problems anymore” are just playing shell-game with the problem, it’s going to be inherent to ANY platform that publishes content as long as there’s commercial incentive to grab people’s attention.
There’s some truth to that but the lack of algorithmic manipulation will make it easier to deal with. Plus you just have more options here on Lemmy to deal with it. Most instance operators have shown a willingness to restrict or even defederate from other instances when they are consistently shit to deal with.
Sure it is, you just don’t like the answer. Which is strange coming from someone who is presumably on Lemmy because they didn’t like the way reddit was conducting business and decided to leave. You moved to a competing service, it’s also an option to just not use those types of social media at all.
This thread has real orphan-crushing-machine vibes to it. Many just take for granted that of course kids have to use social media. They don’t and neither do you. It’s not the path of least resistance but why would you expect taking care of yourself to be easy in a society designed to do everything possible to beat you into submission and extract value from the lifeless husk that remains?
“But but Lemmy is social media and you participate here. Curious.”
No, not in the same way that Instagram and the rest are. Pseudo-anonymous forums are fundamentally different both in the way people interact with one another and in the types of content they tend to generate.
You seem to be reacting contentiously here, maybe you’re thinking I’m defending this social trend, I’m just pointing out that if you think banning, restricting or taking away social media from youth is an answer, you’re ignoring the massive wall of incentive pushed on people by capital forces to use the largest, most commercially active platforms, and we would have a long way to go socially before this isn’t the most attractive option for adults and children alike.
We have to address this issue with adults and kids alike drawn into this magic realm of dopamine scrolling and marketing. If you just say “stop using this thing you like” without an actual motivation behind it or a way to address the addictive nature of it, you won’t have any more success than if you put a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter of a smoker and say “Don’t you smoke these! It’s bad for you!” why are you setting yourself up for disappointment and anger at others?
Like, fucking duh, people know what’s bad for them while continuing to engage in bad behavior, if you can do it fine, great, we’re not talking about how easy it is for you personally to quit bad habits, we’re talking about a larger issue and have to treat populations like populations, not apply your own standard onto millions of people and expect them to handle any of this the same way. This is a social problem, not a moral failing, the moralizing of things that hurt us has been a scourge on actual helping with issues like eating, addiction, sex and literally everything else we try to overcome as a species.
I can’t really follow what your imagined argument is about but it’s kind of annoying and giving self-fart-huffing energy.
First of all, it doesn’t sound like these people actually like these platforms. The article in the OP is about a girl describing the pervasive abuse she experiences while using them. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say in response “you’re clearly not enjoying this so just stop doing it”. Second, that is fundamentally sound advice to both this girl and the person smoking in your analogy. The fact that both might be hard habits to break doesn’t make the solution any less simple. Simple != easy.
No I’m not. I specifically called that out in my response. As I said, avoiding them as the solution may not be easy but it is simple in concept. Maintaining your health in all forms is hard to do but the steps to follow are not complex.
I have seen people in this thread and others use that argument as a way to sidestep the conversation at hand and pivot to something more juvenile and uninteresting. I added it to head off that line of thinking and prevent this from trending in a pointless direction. If you weren’t about to say something like that then feel free to ignore it but I wanted to make it clear I’m not interested in going down that path with you or anyone else reading the thread and considering replying.
You need to learn about addiction I think, you can ask anyone with an addiction if they enjoy their drug, and they will universally say no, they hate it, they wish they could have it out of their life, but their brains are holding them there. This is the “disease” part of addiction and why you can’t just tell someone to “stop doing the thing that’s hurting you” and that expectation that you can do that is harmful. We have studied and researched this in great detail.
This isn’t even an issue with seeing bad things on your feed, this is an issue with there being a “feed” at all, and your own connection to that feed and what you’re getting out of it, what it’s replacing in your life. You, your parents, your kids, everyone is hitting off this drug and everyone is addicted and hating it. It’s literally an addictive drug but we’re not treating it like one because it goes directly to the brain instead of using a chemical go-between to do the exact same thing as a drug. So whole families are doing this drug night and day and not pulling each other out because it’s not being recognized as a drug with dangers.
I am not sure you really know what you’re arguing, as evident by the continued tangents to imagined conversations so I’ll end it here, take some time to think about what it is exactly you’re making a case for or against.
You’re presenting additional nuance as if it disproves what I’m saying and it doesn’t. I understand that overcomimg any addiction is more difficult than saying “I’m going to stop this behavior”. However, any approach you decide to take is fundamentally just breaking down that ultimate goal into practical steps. I’ve repeatedly said I agree that there are usually more steps involved but you seem categorically opposed to agreeing that changing your behavior is the goal of any addiction treatment and that seems like a you problem more than a problem with anything that I’m saying.
If you just bothered reading instead of vomiting words, you’d learn the problem is persistent to real life, too. Asshole.
Of course it is. Do you think “misogyny exists in real life” is a novel idea to anyone old enough to know what that word means? You can’t opt out of being exposed to it in real life though so unless you’re proposing suicide as a solution I’m not sure how that’s related to what we’re discussing. Dumbass.
Do these kids just not have parents or adult guardians?
The vast majority probably do. For a parent or guardian to be useful in this sort of situation they need to take an active interest and forge a bond with their ward, and this day and age I don’t think that all who wish to do that have the ability to, and there’ll be a decent chunk of people who simply don’t care.
I’ve a parent who didn’t really give a fuck. I ended up hitting up lots of random dudes, making a bid for some kind of emotional connection, and no one in my personal vicinity knew, cared, or cared to know. It was a terrible idea, but my story is hardly unique, I know a handful of people with very similar stories.