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.
I think this has always been a problem in many of the online social spaces.
Forums, xbox live, all the way back since the Internet became a common service.
The parents need to be more involved in regulating kids access to internet, socials and otherwise, and they can make choices based on what they see.
Absentee parenting, at least in the digital realm is the problem on both sides of this issue.
This community should be renamed to anything goes community.
Moderation team never actually moderate.
This is an opinion peace. Why is it posted here?
I’m a whole cisgendered 30 year old male who games a bit too much, so I try to discourage misogynistic comments when they’re made by people in games.
I think there’s another layer to the misogyny where any form of “defending” women is seen as white-knighting or simping. You don’t even have to be directly referring to comments about a specific person, but you’ll still be labeled as a loser who likes women, for some reason.
While i agree the internet (i.e. most of the web and commercial social media) has gone to shit lately on account of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic monetization, i do still think kids these days would need life-long therapy if they grew up in 90s internet.
And i don’t think it was better then.I was an early Facebook user. I had an account from 2007-2018. The early years it seemed fun and Fairly innocent. I kept up with friends and saw funny posts. I could curate my feed to be things I wanted to see. When I left Facebook in 2018 it seems like the app was targeting me. Showing me things to rile me up. First I quit the mobile app. I deleted it and used a browser. Then I left Facebook altogether. A year ago I did a similar thing with Instagram. It was no longer a place curated to my interests. It’s horrible. I barely touch it anymore. Even Reddit is not my usual collection of posts that interests me. It’s why I’m on here! Everything is just so polarizing now. I have been able to cut way back and do my own thing. But at 15 friends are your world. Everyone is using the app. Everyone is speaking the speak. It’s so hard for them to disconnect.
What’s interesting is that in the early online days, there was still a lot of misogyny. In the early days of Friendster / Myspace there were a lot more guys online than girls. By the time Facebook started to come around, being online was more of a normal thing, so there were more women and girls online. But, at least at the beginning, the feeds were smaller (mostly just posts from friends) and tended not to be algorithmic. It was a timeline, not a feed.
So, there was a bit of a golden period when all young people were starting to go online, so it wasn’t just a small, male-dominated space any more. There also weren’t algorithmic feeds yet, or influencers, and nowhere near the level of surveillance-based advertising. These days the big social media companies feel that their audience is locked in, and have nowhere to go, so they’re squeezing them, trying to extract as much value as possible.
If you’re a 15-year-old girl your options are really being ostracized by the other teens for not using the apps, or using the apps and dealing with all that shit. I don’t know if being a teen girl has ever been a wonderful experience. But, I sure wouldn’t want to be one right now.
the internet is not a daycare for children.
if you don’t have the skin to be online, don’t be online.
it’s like walking into a biker bar and complaining about the loud music, smoke and lack of healthy food.
I read the article and found it poignant and interesting.
That said, why am I seeing this on !world@lemmy.world ? It is not about anywhere else in the world specifically and it is not even news.
I know that in the rules it says only opinion pieces are potentially removed, but the fact that this “needs” to be published here makes the problem two-fold:
- it creates noise in the community where I would like to see news from anywhere else in the world than the US.
- it means that who posted it here thinks there is no other community where this actually would fit? Looking at the crossposts the other 2 communities (Technology and WomensStuff) seem way more fitting.
Putting everything everywhere doesn’t help communities grow. It just generates noise.
The answer is to disengage yourself, and to teach your children AND OTHERS to disengage from social media.
Social media is harmful, advertising is harmful, drugs are harmful, gambling is harmful. This is a question of societal level harm and is is a problem for individual counties, nations, and states to address by the creation and enforcement of law, and for individuals to address by collectively shaming participants.
How dare you ask of parents to parent their kids?!
Let’s speed up online censorship and surveillance capitalism instead!The problem is not the users who find the content harmful. The problem is with the policies of those platforms and their algorithms.
Still, yes, I also believe mainstream social media now does more harm then good.
This.
I’m convinced it should be illegal to operate social media platforms for profit. It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it would make a dent.
Nope. Read.
“There’s a man screaming in my window and following me around when I leave my house telling me to buy his shit and that I’m his object to play with while I’m just trying to live my life. This harassment is affecting my mental health”
“Nope. Read.”
Idiotic.
collectively shaming participants
That should suffice. Laws/censorship are unnecessary. Stupid opinions on the internet or in society aren’t new.
It’s not only misogyny.
Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.
By the way, this also applies to unhealthy gender expectations on males (including misandry), though this being The Guardian I expect this is about the UK, which IMHO (having lived there and also elsewhere in Europe) is a country with serious problems when it comes to gender expectations around women and insidious “benevolent” sexism (“benevolent” not because it’s good but because it follows the whole “women are fragile creatures” and subsequent subtle disemplowering of women “to protect them” or because “they’re emotional creatures”) which far too often taints the articles in The Guardian because they’re very much from the British upper-middle class Acceptable Feminism, which tends to underestimate the strength of women and favor “protection” “solutions” over empowerment and agency.
So whilst I absolutely believe in all of this and in misogyny online being very bad, especially in certain countries, the choice of focusing on misogyny rather than as a whole in the problem of social media’s Profit Driven amplification of societal dysfunctions in general, is very much a typical privileged British Upper Middle Class “Third Wave Feminist” perspective and choice.
Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.
feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl. When nearly every comments section on a video of a girl my age is filled with disgusting and objectifying comments about her body from boys, it causes me to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own body, and compare myself to her
this hits home for me. I have a near 14 year old daughter and this is the struggle I see with her constantly.
It’s not that she’s particularly non-binary/trans/androgynous, it’s that she’s ashamed/embarrassed to be a girl or be perceived as one. She still likes many traditional feminine things, (ie hair/nails/makeup, romance novels, cutesy characters, etc), and she has no real desire for any kind of masculine interests…
It’s as though being a woman is inferior. It’s “girly”. And that’s what is being internalized. And part of that, I think, is also the culture’s post-ironic loathing for authenticity. Ala, being passionate or earnestly enjoying something is seen as being “cringe”. So, being a girl, who likes girly things, is cringe.
I think both of these things ratchet the internalized misogyny. With the former being what turns the ratchet.
The age verification debate misses the real point. These commercial algorithms are harmful for everybody.
It’s not about age verification, it’s just an excuse for more censorship.
They’re addiction creating and brainwashing. I have believed for the last ten years that they should be illegal, and all feeds should be sorted chronologically or by popularity
The identity verification debate is the point and it is the only reason this article exists in the first place.
These commercial algorithms are harmful for everybody.
Also true.
It’s a business of outrage. Just say the most vile things you can think of, wait for some people to react to it, no matter how, and watch the algorithm do it’s work. Congratulation you are now an influencer.
holy shit these comments
lemmy users stop being individualist-brained, victim-blaming misogynists challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
you don’t stop misogyny by just ignoring it you twats, and hot take, mainstream social media being filled with nothing but privileged assholes being bigots (because all the good people were told to just go somewhere else 😇) is not good, actually!
Way I see it there are two productive paths to take here:
- Start trying to convince women that privacy does in fact matter. Use examples like the menstruation tracking apps potentially being used to identify abortions to illustrate this point.
- Try to relate to the men here on Lemmy and find a way to cooperate. You’ve got a largely fresh population of men here who don’t actually hate women, but have spent years in education being told they are dangerous rapists waiting to happen, or were treated as defective women by their teachers. They need good male role models and women who will treat them with respect, so that they can climb out of the pit without leaving the better parts of themselves behind.
An utterly unproductive use of your time would be trying to fight misogyny on oligarch-owned platforms. You will never win because they find this content useful, as it divides workers and wastes their time and social energy. Just get out, and help others do it too.
you don’t stop misogyny by just ignoring it you twats, and hot take, mainstream social media
Opinions aren’t stopped. They also don’t need to be. Trying to make individualism a put-down is pathetic.
We all have it in our power to ignore or use our voices to promote our messages with as much force as the messages we oppose. That provocative ragebait engages more effectively than constructive dialog reflects a human failing & a need to work on ourselves.
Social media doesn’t need to be good, and we don’t need to keep using it. The beauty of social media is we can be totally irredeemable “twats”, victim-blame up the wazoo, and put out the most infuriating shit conceived until we realize it’s all expression lacking substance & none it matters. It’s only when people start caring too much that we should be concerned for humanity. They need to get a life or something, stop putting so much of themselves on words, images, & sounds on a screen.
I mean this is why I stopped using social media 10 years ago. Bunch of nonsense drivel, everyday.
I’m not victim blaming, this shit shouldn’t happen, but if you are on a platform and that platform has shit moderation and you keep seeing content you don’t like, well, maybe you should leave that platform? I mean this is why we all left reddit, right?
If I walk into a wall once, then it’s an accident. If I keep walking into it, then I’m just stupid.
Genuine question: What do you categorise this comment as, other than you using social media?
I don’t consider Lemmy or other message style boards as social media.
We aren’t posting pictures of ourselves or posting updates of our lives on here. We don’t use our real names(or I hope we don’t).
Please define social media for me, because it seems like everyone’s take on it is “a website where you interact with others”, which is way too broad and I would say that applies to the entire internet then, which is a slippery slope.
*Edit, another post linked the “Social Graph” which I think encapsulates what social media is vs. what it is not.
I keep falling into the same trap as well, when telling people I quit using “social media” but am very much active on social media platforms - just not the ones controlled by big tech.
Maybe we need a shorthand for “profit-driven algorithm-controlled influencer cesspools” so we can separate it from “non-profit decentralized social media platforms” like Lemmy and Mastodon?
It’s called the Social Graph. Platforms that implement a social graph are social media.
The fact that people don’t know this basic, fundamental mechanism is the problem. Even the technologically inclined haven’t been able to make this simple distinction.
People think “social media” means a place for people to be social. That’s not it. Social media is specifically platforms that implement the social graph and/or similar types of algorithms that are designed to manipulate sociological relationships.
Traditional message boards are not social media because there is no algorithm. In the past reddit wasn’t social media because it technically did not have a social graph. It was a simple aggregrator with comment sections. That alone does not make social media. reddit does have a social graph now. That’s when it became social media.
Lemmy doesn’t have social graph algorithms.
The social graph is quite possibly one of the most dangerous inventions the 21st century and nobody talks about it. Yet it rules your entire life. It’s what makes the world turn. It’s what is dictating cultures and societies. It’s what is determining what goes viral. It determines the daily headlines.
Hey thank you for the term drop! I haven’t heard of “social graph” and it falls into my “feelings” of what social media has been for me(or what I hate about it(algorithms)). I am definitely a “one in ten thousand” today for this.
Maybe, but I’ve definitely seen people disagree about what constitutes social media - e.g. some thing youtube is or isn’t, other people lemmy/reddit are or aren’t, it seems pretty inconsistent. Maybe it’s a generational thing?
In this sense, yes to Reddit and YouTube. YouTube may not be very social but it clearly has an algorithm that pushes toxic content/stereotypes.
And im going to say no on Lemmy. Lemmy may be social but there’s no algorithm pushing toxic content. Maybe I’m missing it but there’s seems to be very little toxic content.
No. All walls should be padded because we assume everyone is going to walk into them…
Depends if an algorithm is going to pop that wall in front of everyone repeatedly. Ideally, pad the wall, fix the stupid algorithm, and prosecute the creators of both.
So suicide, then? That’s your suggestion?
Keep walking into that wall bud.
That’s not what they said at all.
I’ve been a social media moderator and it’s an awful, thankless, volunteer job. And I think objectively we kept our community very tightly focused on our narrow topic and civil. But we’d have never gotten to that point without a ton of help from the community itself. We outlined our vision and had clear, reasonable guidelines, so it was very easy to determine if something was against the rules to report.
But this was a special interest subreddit, and it was a constant battle. I made sure that every ruling and interaction I made had thoughtful intent. I had to step down because it was making me legitimately depressed.
I could never fault a moderator for being overwhelmed, especially for a community as chaotic as instagram. For these large, general purpose communities, it’s impossible to police directly. It truly takes the whole community to enforce and report bad behavior.
So no, you shouldn’t blame the victims, but you have to understand it’s a massive systemic problem with no easy solution. The best advice you can give really is “Take care of yourself, and avoid problematic communities.”
Maybe I’m not seeing the victim blaming comments, but I do see a lot of “individual responsibility” posting. It sucks when people do that because they are right, just about the wrong thing. Like, veganism. Definitionally the most moral way to consume food, and one of the healthiest, but does absolutely nothing to disrupt factory farming. Getting off social media is amazing for your mental health. It also does nothing to address the issue; if every Lemmy user dropped Instagram, Meta literally would not even notice. It would do nothing to pressure them to fix their own platform, let alone advance the dismantling of patriarchy. So yes. Drop socials. If anything, women are; most platforms are at best 2:1 men to women. But to see people posting like that is the solution to the systemic issue is disappointing.
The 2:1 ratio of course just degrades the platform further because there’s too few to challenge the misogyny. Like public officials quitting under Trump, you can hardly blame them but it makes the problem worse not better.
You’re not going to save Instagram. The owners do not want you to save it and you do not control it. It was a lost cause before you even knew there was a problem.
Some systemic problems cannot be solved from inside the system.
I am certainly not going to save Instagram, since I never joined. But if you mean it can’t be saved, that might be true as well.
If every female person left Instagram today, what would happen to the misogyny? Would it be starved of fuel or would it escalate and spiral until it explodes in (increased) physical attacks?
And if the women and girls created their own female-positive space, how long before it was brigaded? Judging by everyTwoX post that ever hit R/All, I’m putting the over/under at 6 hours.
Systematic issues aren’t any one person’s responsibility, and those who thing it is, tend to be violent assholes.
All we can do as individuals is be responsible for ourselves. We are not responsible for other people.
However, the parents are responsible for this 15 year old girl. She is not responsible for herself as she is not an adult.
holy shit these comments
Lemmy is no better than reddit and other large platforms broadly when it comes to being an insular community of tech-focused young guys with horrific sexual insecurity.
Despite the wallpaper that it’s supposed to be further left than other sites, just about every online community is going to have a large share of “incel adjacent” shut-ins, as they are the segment most likely to keep a forum or website active. I’ve seen all the same rotten sentiments across Lemmy about women as I’ve seen deep in the trenches of the gender-wars during gamergate, it’s just usually softened with some disclaimer.
a large share of “incel adjacent” shut-ins, as they are the segment most likely to keep a forum or website active
“But not me, I’m different even though I’m here too!”
This user:
Lol proves my point.
How do you propose stopping it?
The people who propose “age gating” social media are essentially advocating the end of Internet anonymity and privacy for us all. After all, you can’t effectively determine one users age or identity without collecting them all.
Is removing digital privacy really something we want to be flirting with? Especially in the era of Palantir, Flock, and the Trump Administration?
Democracy, freedom of speech, and privacy are all related.
Without privacy, one can’t have freedom of speech because bad actors and authoritarians in power can and will silence critics. Without freedom of speech, one can’t live in a democracy, because having the ability to organize and speak out against those in power without fear of persecution is the basis of democracy.
Maybe I’m just more cynical than most, but I don’t see the elimination of all privacy on the Internet as a good solution for something that can otherwise be managed by basic parenting and personal agency.
We are fools if we willingly give the corporate oligarchs that control mainstream social media (and, by extension, Trump) our full real identities in a futile attempt to “think about the children”.
Requiring large social media platforms to regulate and moderate hateful speech would be a start. Big tech has been largely dropping the ball in this regard.
Cases-in-point, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), X Corp (the App Formerly Known As Twitter) and Alphabet (YouTube.)
X’s Grok AI has been used to generate millions of sexualised images. Sometimes women get objectified and undressed without their knowledge nor consent by people promoting Grok. Sometimes the victims are minors. The fact that X hasn’t been shut down speaks volumes about how much billionaires have been able to get away with crap that would land anybody else behind bars for a long time.
YouTube… Have you also noticed more hateful content being posted to the platform. This isn’t an example that I think I can link to here, but there is a far-right ragtime musician called Foundring who was previously banned from the platform years ago for hate speech. Either due to ban evasion or his ban being lifted, he came back two years ago and recently started posting piano covers of old vintage ragtime and folk music from the late 18th Century. One of his videos, which contained the word “N*****” in the title (yes, hard-R) got catapulted by the YouTube algorithm and is currently sitting at 1.2 million views. It’s 37 days old and still up.
educating men and boys, and actually moderating misogyny (and other bigotries) would be a good start, how many reports of horrific posts end up with “after careful examination by our moderation team, we have found that this post does not violate our community guidelines…”
Yeah. I have a feeling that stopping it is, somehow, not desirable to a portion of the commentors.
I’m constantly baffled by the amont of misogyny some Lemmy users through around if the topic is even slightly about women.
I don’t have any skin in this fight but sexism is wrong from either side of the isle. I feel bad for kids who grow up with parents like this. I get that its hard for women but its also not easy for young men to navigate this madness.
Top three read article btw. Shilled by the same people who will soon have a track of you everywhere you do or go. You won’t even have a permission to fart without paying the fine.
15- y old girl. Most likely written by a 40 y old who can’t understand how parenting works. If you are a failure it doesn’t mean the rest of population now needs to be enforced in id links and checks and give away their right to privacy. Fucking dumbasses
Yeah, “just stop using social media” is an insanely stupid take that misses the point so hard it makes you wonder how someone distorted their perception so hard that they can even react that way.
“Stop using social media” is literally the only real solution because oligarchs will never again risk letting us actually connect with each other. You stay on “social” media and you will just be getting run in circles by engagement algorithms and bots.
You cannot save Facebook, Instagram, X, or Reddit because their owners will not allow you to.
No, it’s not. It might seem impossible for society to improve, but that is the solution, and talking about it without telling people to just avoid certain avenues is the only way to that end.
Don’t use Instagram or TikTok ✅👍
Enragebait is a well known consequence of using a profit-driven Algorithm, i.e. enshittification.
15-year-olds are not being specifically targeted so much as caught up in the phenomena occuring overall.
Teens are too stupid to not use it. Most people are too stupid to not use it. I actually see very little wrong with no one under 16 being allowed on any forms of social media. Among all the stuff like this (that I doubt was really written by a 15 year old, and was more likely made by a person or organization trying to get the law to pass) It fucks up how you regulate dopamine and gives you the attention span of a goldfish.
I’ve seen plenty of misogyny here on the threadiverse. It’s not solved just by not using Instagram or TikTok.
Edit: it’s in this very comment section, in fact.
Read the article instead of the headline ✅👍
The thing is this isn’t a phenomena that’s recent. This type of shitty misogynism has been going on for decades/centuries. The only difference between then and now is that we have social apps that make it easier to spread.
I’m coming up on 70 yrs old and misogynism has always been the bane of my existence.
I’m not quite 70 years old, but I’ve been around for long enough to laugh at this line from the article: “Sexual equality has ceased to exist online”
Only a 15 year old could think that sexual equality ever existed online. It may be hard to believe, but it’s probably better now than it ever has been. Back in the early days online spaces were so male dominated that people had trouble believing that women were even online at all.
The extent of apps promoting and amplifying this hate posting is a recent phenomenon, through the so-called algorithmic feeds. It all needs attacking.
Yep.
The primary problem is that ‘the algorithm’ amplifies all of our worst traits, to the extent that someone is not critical of what it is showing them.
Oh, and its also addictive.
Oh, and its also hugely profitable.
Its a giant ratking of feedback loops, and we really should just use Alexander’s solution to knots.
The underlying biases and bigotry in humanity has ways of addressing and alleviating it.
But apparently, nothing is strong enough to defeat convenient, targeted, personalized reinforcement of basically, your Jungian shadow.
And its very much relevant that all of this is done to sell advertisements and establish brands, which themselves basically just are also selling you validation, a personality, opinions, ‘facts’.
Its the fanciest Skinner Box that’s ever been designed.
good thing these men don’t exist outside of social media! whew, we dodged a big one there…
and i sure hope this school girl doesn’t go to any place regularly where she sees these teenage boys, oh wouldn’t that be unfortunate???
Don’t use Instagram or TikTok
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.
This isn’t a platform problem
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.
This isn’t realistic to tell a kid who uses social media
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.
“But but Lemmy is social media and you participate here. Curious.”
I can’t really follow what your imagined argument is about but it’s kind of annoying and giving self-fart-huffing energy.
If you just say “stop using this thing you like” without an actual motivation behind 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!”
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.
you’re ignoring the massive wall of incentive pushed on people by capital forces to use the largest, most commercially active platforms
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 can’t really follow what your imagined argument is about
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.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say in response “you’re clearly not enjoying this so just stop doing it”
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.
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”
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.
Woman: I keep getting catcalled on the street and it’s disturbing my sense of safety.
OpenStars: stop going outside, easy.
Knowing that these sites are bad and the algorithm is part of that doesn’t make “just don’t use those sites” a viable option when most or all of someone’s peers are also using them. That is part of the social media companies’ strategy, to make switching costs so high no one leaves.
I agree with your sentiment here. Obviously, it’s possible to avoid using Instagram and TikTok, and it’s basically impossible to avoid using the street.
On the other hand, if you’re a teenage girl, it may be nearly impossible to not use these big corporate social media sites. A big part of being a teen is socializing with other teens. A big part of being an adolescent is learning to fit in with other adolescents without constant adult supervision. It’s one of the reason that home schooled kids have a rough time once they hit college, university or work. Many remain deeply strange for a long while after that.
If all the other teens in your social group are using Instagram and TikTok and you’re the one person who isn’t, you’re probably going to be ostracized. Liking and commenting on each-other’s social media posts is an important ritual of friendship at that age.
Sometimes parents ban or restrict social media usage by their kids. To a certain extent that can shield the kid, because it’s no longer their fault, and their friends might accept that. But, still, if the kid isn’t on social media, they’re probably not getting invited to in-person events, they don’t know what the important topics of conversation are, and so-on.
I mean, the nerve of saying “don’t use social media” on a social media site is pretty rich. And, don’t think a 15-year old is going to switch from TikTok to PeerTube or something. You might be able to get them to try it out, but you’re not easily going to migrate her entire friend group. The content is also not there. Plus, fediverse sites are inhabited by deeply strange people. I love you all, but I wouldn’t want you interacting with a 15 year old girl.
Well someone has to be first to switch platforms.
Woman: I keep getting catcalled on the street and it’s disturbing my sense of safety.
OpenStars: stop going outside, easy.
False equivalency. Going outside is not similar to using Instagram.
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Looks like you’ve mistakenly replied to the wrong comment. Which is ironic because… try reading? With your eyes?
Yep. Apologies.
Don’t use Instagram or TikTok
Yeah, in general, my answer to “I don’t like using Internet site X” is “well, don’t use that site.”
There are a vast number of sites out there. Use one that you like. I don’t have a very high opinion of lemmygrad.ml, but I deal with that by not going there.
“But TikTok is a big site!”
Okay. I don’t use Instagram or TikTok. I can assure you that it’s very possible to not use them.
“But my friends use Website X!”
Well, making the probably-reasonable assumption that the relationship is symmetric and they also use it because you do, that situation isn’t going to change unless someone decides to use something else.
I think this type of argument is relatively flawed. Obviously I’m very happy to leave one platform for another, but most people dont like change and want to be where thier friends are. I think it’s reasonable to expect them to get over the former, but because of the former they would probably have to leave their friends behind. Thats obviously not viable for teenagers and it’s a rare few that are willing to do that into thier 20s as well.
Seeing as getting people to make a move is so hard I think forcing these platforms not to be so vile would be a good move. We should put the onus on the platforms, not the users.
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Indeed. Not saying that adult women don’t face sexist harassment and that that isn’t a problem to solve, but kids shouldn’t be on social media in the first place. Not to mention that social media is 90% bots anyway. The majority of the blame here falls on the parents.
Why should we police the victims instead of the perps???
Because it’s easier to monitor your children’s use of the internet than to remove dumb men, hateful men, and bots from the internet?
What if we stopped making it profitable to be a hateful guy on the internet by removing the monetization of drama and rage and stopped making contention a career?
Because it’s easier to monitor your children’s use of the internet than to remove dumb men, hateful men, and bots from the internet?
Is it? One of those groups famously struggles to program video recorders and it ain’t the kids. Teenagers can probably defeat any firewall you set up, including by gaining access to someone else’s wifi or device. So let’s at least try to police the perps instead of their victims.
Just because one thing is more difficult to do than another doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.
Ban those men and their IP addresses off every social media possible.
It isn’t really that easy to monitor or control one’s children’s use of the internet. They’re smart and can be good at figuring out ways to get what they want; more so as they get older. It’s better to stay aware of what they’re likely exposed to, and talk to them and prepare them to recognize harmful things and avoid them.
NO ONE should be on social media in its current state.
Lemmy is social media, too.
The problem isn’t social media. The problem is profit-driven monopolies incentivized to promote high-emotion content. The problem, more generally, is monopolies that no one has hindered since 1974.
Plus capitalism is currently being run by a global pedophilia cabal who owns the media, so there’s that as well.
Oh come on, it’s not like the Trump-Epstein files describe meetings with Musk, oh wait… Zuck, oh no, he’s there too… hmmmm.
Abhorrent to hear such a young person having to deal with this. It gets easier as you grow older, but it never stops being a vile state of things. Nobody should have to grow ‘thick skin’ to just participate, as wonderful aspects of their personality can die with it.
The gut reaction is to point to the easy and straightforward option, to just leave. But in the end this doesn’t solve anything. This is exactly how many safe spaces die, on top of it blaming victims. Once abusers are let in and tolerated, the victims will start leaving if they can. And eventually, the space is no longer that of the victims, but that of the abusers. This happens with nazis at a bar, smokers at restaurants, assholes on the road, unruly people in the train. It leads to a society where everyone nice just sits at home because that’s ultimately the last safe place left.
The hard truth is that the group that doesn’t take a stand and accepts in the abusers, is the only place we can look at for a solution. But there’s no easy way to get to them often. If they let it get this far, it’s essentially pointless. (The big social media platforms for sure). I think the only real alternative is to build alternative safe places. Reach out to friends and other victims. Let them know there is another place where they can actually feel safe. But it will be hard and grueling. At first it might seem like you are alone, that nobody shares your grievances. But it takes time. Years even. You might get assholes trying to get in anyways, that have to be harshly rejected to keep the spirit alive. You might get sabotaged from outside. It’s tough - but as far as solutions go, it’s a real one.
I consider Lemmy one of these places. And I think it’s very important for anyone to realize they’re in a community built on those grounds. It must always be protected with full force. From the smallest friend group, to the biggest of governments. Even when that’s hard to do.
Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it. As wrong as it is, I persistently find myself considering if there are truly any boys out there who are not misogynistic to some extent, and have even questioned whether I can find love in the future because of this. I understand that boys are victims of harmful content, as well as perpetrators of online misogyny – they’re growing up learning how to do this from the adults who post misogynistic videos first. But even so, I feel such a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.
That’s fucked up.
That level of misogyny is definitely learned, but it’s not just her age group. I’m floored by (for example) some comments my Dad makes, a “quiet, respectful, classy” type guy who’s never had a Facebook or Insta, who’d you’d never expect to hear insults from. And it’s definitely worse after he watches Fox News… that shit is like a drug.
My school “friends” dropped my jaw, sometimes. They got a lot from their parents, but social media (Faceboook back then) absolutely made it worse.
Even here on Lemmy, the disrespect or casual sexism from commenters sometimes makes me want to throw up. Not that I’m a particularly standup guy or anything, but the longer I live, the more I wonder “the fuck happened to my sex?” I certainly can’t critique this girl for wondering the same thing.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the people here going “just don’t use social media then” are missing part of the point. Like, as she specifically mentioned, the misogynistic discourse happening online is also happening offline. Even if you yourself manage to avoid most online misogyny by not using social media, you’ll still be exposed to it through everyone else who is and all the people watching and reading stuff like Fox. It’s just kind of everywhere.
Exactly! Precisely. It’s affecting her real life, too.
That “just don’t use social media then” response in itself feels… misogynistic? This isn’t her choice; she can’t ignore the catastrophic effects.
“Stop using social media” is probably good advice for everyone, but as you say, its not the solution to the this problem unless literally everyone follows it and even then there is more to do since its not like the internet invented misogyny.
Yeah, it is great advice. But I’m under no illusion that’s happening anytime soon, not for most people.
The context matters. And in this instance “stop using social media” feels more like blaming the abused teenager while the rest of the world carries on, like its totally dismissive of what she’s saying.
It feels very reminiscent of “well don’t dress like that then”
Yup. And that’s bullshit. It’s way past the time we should be teaching boys how to NOT be misogynistic asswipes.
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the issue isn’t just that she’s reading and hearing these comments online, the issue is that teenage boys are doing so. social media has normalised this kind of behaviour to them, and they bring those views with them to the real world where girls will interact with them: school, sports clubs etc.
Gestures at Lemmy comments in this post. See what I mean?
We gotta stop this Lemmy from forcing her to do all that
I’m reporting you for still not even bothering to read the fucking article. The is un-fucking-real. Just open the fucking link and absorb the words written in it. Then come back and apologize for being an asshole.
Yeah I’ve already read it. Feel free to use the report button however you choose, though. That’s what it is there for!
Oh ok, great, so you’ve now learned the problem extends to real life, and the boys around her talk this way in person as well as online. So just quitting the entire Internet wouldn’t help in the slightest. What’s your apology gonna be like?
So just quitting the entire Internet wouldn’t help in the slightest.
help
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/help
slightest
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slightest
So not voluntarily subjecting herself to internet abuse would …not… improve the situation in at least the smallest way? Are you sure?
Part of the problem is that it’s a feedback loop. People use social media and somebody makes some misogynistic content which angers people which then gets the algorithm to promote it heavily. Then somebody else who’s inspired by that content makes their own misogynistic content and the cycle repeats. Once enough of that content is circulating it becomes the norm and a bunch of people start dogpiling on it to be part of the in crowd. It’s particularly pernicious when it’s being used to blame people’s problems on others which is how the incel and red pill groups got their start.
It’s not just the girls/women that need to get off these platforms, it’s the boys/men as well. Algorithms that reward anger and controversy are a significant part of the problem and really should be looked at to be regulated the same way gambling and addictive drugs are.
should be looked at to be regulated the same way gambling and addictive drugs are.
Yet here we are, still in the War on Drugs. Betting apps are exploding in popularity and being straight up paraded by politicians and business leaders.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don’t think the engagement feedback issue will be addressed directly. It’s too profitable. We’re cooked, for a while. So maybe we should reach for every half measure with a chance of passing, like restricting kids?
