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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If misogyny were somehow magically solved tomorrow, then Xhitter would still remain a
misogynistichellhole, featuring a cesspit of whatever traits of humanity triggered clicking or views or whatever generates the highest profits (maybe in the future, trying to gain the attention of bots will vastly outweigh what happens to us here humans, in the same manner as corporations replaced individual businesses in the economic sphere?).The specific situation described in the article is misogy, but it points to deeper roots of enshittification. The 15 year old girl will still feel put upon, even unsafe, even if it has nothing to do with her femininity anymore.
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.
If i avoided every place I ever encountered misogyny, my life would shrink considerably. Forget work. Never a church. Goodbye school, the grocery store, movie theaters, almost all spaces online, my local park.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The erosion of free (or mostly free), teen-friendly physical third spaces is a big part of this problem, imo. As is the culture of clamping down on kids’ free movement irl. Young people need to have safe spots to hang out together without being pressured to spend money or have a ton of adults breathing down their necks.
Not saying that misogyny or bigotry would disappear, but bringing these back in an accessible way could allow kids to grow again without dealing with corporate surveillance apparatuses as their only social lifeline.
I quite enjoyed hanging out with my friends without having a flood of antisocial adults hurl venom at us on repeat. They deserve that chance too.
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That’s a completely fair question and point.
My being an adult skews my answer, so idk if it’s a fair one but I recently went to a local concert and had a blast with the other people there. What makes me, as an individual, excited overall is knowing other people will be there and the place will feel alive.
Unstructured but available activity seems to be the unifying theme for the location attractions of our own pasts. I don’t have a perfect solution but identifying the issues seems to be a step, at least.
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.
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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.
Do these kids just not have parents or adult guardians?
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.
Not true. It actually makes your attention span WORSE than a goldfish! 😞
Read the article instead of the headline ✅👍
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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?
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.
Now that you say that… I do agree. But at the same time, I wouldn’t want my daughter to be exposed to gross misoginy in the first place. That kind of thing affects someone deeply, especially teenagers, I think. I wouldn’t want my son to be exposed to it either. Not sure what to do. I’m relieved they are far from reaching that age, yet I’m aware that time will come.
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.
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Yea, fully agree with that.
But until then, don’t leave your children on their own.
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Thanks, I appreciate the tips.
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.
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.
“Social media” generally implies an algorithm delivering monotized content, so Lemmy is not true social media.
It is media that is social, but it’s nonetheless very very very different.
We here are not:-).
Well, I’m self aware enough to acknowledge the irony here, but I will say that I’d rather be on Lemmy than reddit.
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.
The majority? Seriously?