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.
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!
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.
That is effectively the definition from my understanding. Lemmy, Reddit, and similar boards are social media because the content is primarily user-generated.
It probably feels like the entire internet because it's where many of us are spending most of our time.
Yeah and I don't accept that definition. Is GitHub social media then? Is the LTT forums social media? Is Wikipedia? Nexus mods? All of these sites contain "user generated content".
Because I would say none of those sites are social media sites. But all of these loose definitions are being thrown around and next thing you know you'll need to verify your ID to look at any Wikipedia article.
I guess my take is anywhere people interact with others in a conversational way, yes. You can see a timeline of posts, you can comment and reply, etc. You can't do that on 99% of websites or apps. You can't do it on your banking app or your weather app or your insurance website, etc. The lines blur around things like Wikis where you can chat with people on talk pages.
Limiting "social media" to places you post pictures of yourself rules out most earlier forms of social media before that became a thing, but looking back you wouldn't say twitter wasn't. The Wiki link you gave also links to "list of social media websites", which includes Reddit, as a directly opposing point.
I don't think it's clear-cut, and I know different people have different opinions.
Personally I didn't consider Reddit as social media 10+ years ago, but in the last few years it has definitely become social media, and I would attribute that to the Social Graph concept.
Right now, I don't consider Lemmy or other link aggregators(Piefed) as social media, same for PeerTube as that is more of an entertainment/video sharing platform that isn't focused on a social aspect. And I guess Matrix wouldn't be social media for me either because I see it as a chat platform where you can be social, but the focus isn't on sharing personal details of yourself. But I would consider Mastodon and PixelFed as social media and their focus is on pure social interactions. Which I guess I don't know if I consider YouTube to be social media either at that point.
Maybe I'm hyper-fixating on the "media" part of "social media". But again, I think clear and concise definitions of these types of sites need to be created BEFORE laws are in-place, because it seems that everyone is focusing on whether or not a website or service has "social" functions, which again, is a slippery slope.
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.
"But not me, I'm different even though I'm here too!"
This user:
Lol proves my point.
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."
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.
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.
My solution? Oh I'm not saying the women should have stayed in Instagram! It's one reason I never joined in the first place. If anything I was wondering if women created a No Boys Allowed WomenSpace totally separate. And still I think it would be brigaded.
I think we agree on the basic evil of societal misogyny. Although as an old woman who has lived through changes, I have seen that having more women in a workplace or field, especially as we start to fill the upper echelons, can help fade certain parts of the misogyny or at least drive it underground.
Women simply prefer spaces where they can control the membership and replies to ensure validation of their beliefs. You'd be surprised by how censorious women spaces can be. Posting replies on their spaces is never egalitarian. And women have no problem brigading either.
or maybe dumbfucks like you just think you're a lot more egalitarian than you actually are.
Men and women have different interest. It's mostly a fantasy to expect 50/50 participation.
Way I see it there are two productive paths to take here:
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.
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".
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..."
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.)
Meta changed their guidelines in the wake of Donald Trump's re-election to allow trans and non-binary people to be called "it", and for posts/comments branding them mentally ill.
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.
Digital privacy and anonymous posting are two different things.
I would argue that they're closely related.
Imagine a circumstance in which you have to use your real ID to sign up for a social media site which happens to be owned by a billionaire oligarch with close ties to an out-of-control fascist authoritarian president with no reservations about pulling whatever string he can to maintain his grip on power, and I think you'll understand why.
You may know my user name, but really not too much else about me, because of the partial anonymity of having a username which is loosely coupled to my real life identity.
If we lived in a world where we could trust our government or the corporations that control mainstream social media, then maybe it wouldn't be an issue. We don't.
You're setting up a false premise. It doesn't have to be done that way.
I don't think I am. How else do you verify a person's age?
So far the options seem to be:
I suppose you could use a credit card transaction, but so far nobody seems to be going that route.
Regardless, ALL of this shit is a poor substitute for decent parenting.
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.
Dude FUCK OFF!!! It's okay to bring up men's issues or whatever if you think they should be discussed more often, but if you're gonna do that, you should make your own post instead of bitching about it in the replies to a post about the insane shit we have to go through. It's genuinely fucking crazy, nine times out of ten whenever "muh wHat aBoUT mEn" comes up, it's in the response to conversations about misogyny, and I'm lowballing here. You're just derailing the conversation and it's fucking rude.
If you are going to lead with being rude I won't bother wasting energy on you more than this response.
Yeah. I have a feeling that stopping it is, somehow, not desirable to a portion of the commentors.
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.
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.
"Social media" is not society; it's a series of platforms built by billionaires for the purpose of control.
Filled with people expressing opinions. I don't understand how this could possibly be controversial or difficult to grasp.
You're literally pretending social media isn't real or doesn't matter as long as you just do the right thing and ignore it instead of addressing the horrible ideas spread on it.
I don't understand what you're failing to grasp. You see what you're allowed to see. They are signal boosting shit heads while suppressing everyone else. If your message begins to spread, they will just pull the platform out from under your feet.
How do you propose to win on billionaire-owned social media when they can just kick your legs out at will the moment you stand too tall for their good? Look at all the Reddit protests that amounted to nothing besides getting moderators booted from their subs, they're a perfect example of this.
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