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.
Idk sounds like internet bullying to me. It’s not new. It’s not evolved. It requires the same basic knowledge and precautions.. it involves vigilant parents and an involved school system. We didn’t solve bullying we embraced it. It’s not different, it’s all encompassing now.
But the personal data involved for most individuals has increased dramatically, which increases the risks of harm dramatically. Most people's online identities are now intricately tied to their daily lives for better or worse.
Which some of us learn the hard way. I don't think I've seen anyone value privacy prior to being burned themselves first. But at that point, the damage is already done.
It's also unreasonable to expect everyone to know everything. For example, I don't drive. I wouldn't know how to stop a car from the backseat if the driver were to have a medical emergency.
Parents couldn't track where their kids were doing 24/7 prior to the Internet. What makes you think they can do that now?
As a side note: do post-2020 work schedules allow parents to communicate with their children sufficiently?
As someone who's been hurt and hurt people back in the day this is NOT the way to do things. Whoever thinks it's possible to "tough it out" has not been through systemic bullying for years, nor know of the physical and mental medical toll it has decades after the original incidents. I do not wish this upon anybody.
Quite frankly, I am sick of people downplaying these issues because the "bullying" issue no longer affects them while chat control and age verification does. There should be a platform to discuss both these problems without downplaying the consequences of ignoring either.
The fact that this is what you think makes for vigilant parenting explains a lot of what we're failing to do as parents in society today. Tracking kids all the time does not equal vigilant parenting.
I mean. That's why I'm not interested in kids or parenting at all.
I think there are a lot of gremlins out there with zero compassion and consideration for others. If parents were more vigilant about what was happening (and less dismissive of what other kids are saying) a lot of people would not have been hurt. Including myself.
I think the bare minimum is parents need to know (1) what your children's hobbies are (2) where your children are when leaving the house (3) what social media platforms/games does your child access. And I'm not saying this in a technical "surveillance" way, I mean the kids should be made to feel comfortable enough to provide this information to said adults. If kids are unwilling to provide this information, or even deliberately provide fake or masking information then you have a problem.
I’m not downplaying it at all, I just disagree with the points that parents don’t understand, and there’s nothing they can do. I think that is part of the problem. I think people should have time to raise their kids and prepare them for the world. Part of the problem is systemic, part of the problem is access. You certainly can create an environment with less access, but that might hurt corporate profits in the future. Who’s forcing this kids to exist on their devices all the time? Who’s giving them access to cyber bullying? Also like how do you stop bullying in an era where the public elects bully’s to run the world; and the corporations make money promoting your kids being bullied.
Schools making social media part of the curriculum, where homework involves designing social media content for learning purposes.
And the fact that being the "odd one out" means social death. There are no more teen friendly skate parks to go to or malls to hang out at. Whatever public spaces remain are unsafe due to people driving 60 down a public road with minimum sidewalks. You're either online with your friends or you're alone.
It's the three body problem: putting three stellar objects in close proximity to each other will always result in a unstable system.
No idea. I'm no expert here. But the first step is to recognize there's an issue and talk about it. And not just here on lemmy, but everywhere.
To your first point indeed! Google spent a lot of money placing themselves in education. But it’s just like the housing crisis. The core problem was your local school board (parents usually) letting them in the door. It was the parents that resorted to iPads because parenting a 3-6 year old is hard.