I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day | Anonymous

6 months ago by HellsBelle to c/world

Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see

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.

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mjr 45 points 6 months ago

And yet some politicians say the solution is to ban 15 year olds from social media, rather than police the platforms, algorithms and users. Please contact your representative and ask them to police the platforms, not bring in creepy ID checks.

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passepartout 33 points 6 months ago

Never understood how the solution to all platforms going to shit is making users upload their ID. This does neither fix the problem nor the symptom. I mean, I understand why it's done but not how people come to think this is a good idea.

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core 24 points 6 months ago

ID laws are about control. If you can't post anonymously the govt can track people who don't agree with them. Or LGBTQ+ people, or whoever the govt doesn't like.

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SinningStromgald 18 points 6 months ago

I mean, I understand why it's done but not how people come to think this is a good idea.

They are the same people who think "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide. Only bad people need/want anonymity." They are also either childless or don't care about their child's online access and activity.

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OpenStars 10 points 6 months ago

A good nearly half of people use authoritarian thinking rather than have to put in effort to think for themselves even slightly.

Sheeple

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brucethemoose 11 points 6 months ago

The whole point of the algorithm is attention. Yeah, they could try to actually police it so coded versions of “kill yourself, ugly bitch” don’t spread, but that language works, and it makes the posters rich.

You can’t get around for “addiction for ad dollars” being the whole point. It’s always going to surface ragebait, trash talk or whatever because that’s what sells attention, no matter how hard it’s fought.


…So yeah. Policing isnt going to do anything. Don’t tell your representatives something that won’t work, and worse, has the “theatre” of helping.

I don’t know a good “solution” other than burning it all to the ground, but honestly, banning as many people as possible sounds like a good idea to me.

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Maeve 7 points 6 months ago

You can’t get around for “addiction for ad dollars” being the whole point. It’s always going to surface ragebait, trash talk or whatever because that’s what sells attention, no matter how hard it’s fought.

Yes you can.

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mjr 3 points 6 months ago

Why do you think going after the haters, taking their riches away, booting them offline and possibly imprisoning some of the worst, plus going after the operators of platform that spread hate "isn't going to do anything"? We're at the point now where there's so much hate that it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel at first.

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fonix232 9 points 6 months ago

To a certain degree I agree with the assessment - children (under-16 would be my definition here) shouldn't have full access to what we consider social media today.

Things were different 10, 20 years ago when it wasn't so centralised. You'd have independent forums, all with reliable moderation, and so on, plus with little to no ads, and the ad networks themselves were more inclined to not have inappropriate things shown, especially to children - basically all the "make your dick grow 7 foot long" and "8 cock hungry MILFs waiting for you in your area" type of ads were all relegated to porn sites to begin with.

Today? We have centralised social media with little to no moderation beyond basic keyword filtering, ad networks not giving a fuck about the content they push, and every single malicious actor having access to these platforms to further their agendas... Not to mention unfettered access to children by any and all accounts.

What IMO would be the best solution is to force social media sites to have a cordoned off "children" section where kids can socialise with their peers without predatory adults having any form of access to them. But that's easier said than done, unfortunately.

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brucethemoose 4 points 6 months ago

I mean, old forums were pretty messed up.

Your point stands though. The old internet isn't what the average person experiences, anymore.

What IMO would be the best solution is to force social media sites to have a cordoned off “children” section where kids can socialise with their peers without predatory adults having any form of access to them. But that’s easier said than done, unfortunately.

In real life, we call this school!

It can definitely be done. It's not difficult, it's just that the world is not heading in that direction.

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adhd_traco 4 points 6 months ago

SG62Ooei7x5jIcw.png

Screenshot of this Mastodon toot, because I can't get newlines to work in quoted-text.

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couldhavebeenyou 3 points 6 months ago

How much do you think it'd cost to 'police the platforms'?

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TubularTittyFrog 1 point 6 months ago

lemmy is only took off because reddit policed it and kicked most of the users here off.

the problem with policing speech and bullying is it's totally subjective. i used to be told I was a bully for offering people writing suggestions.

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mjr 1 point 6 months ago

Less than it's costing us in lives and damage not to police them!

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bobzer -2 points 6 months ago

How do you police someone you can't identify?

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remon 18 points 6 months ago

By closing the accounts? Facebook doesn't need to know who you are in real life to ban you.

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Duke_Nukem_1990 8 points 6 months ago

I very highly doubt the majority of dudes posting shit like that even use a vpn. Therefore they can be ifentified by IP.

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CainTheLongshot 1 point 6 months ago

As the others have stated, you don't need to know them to ban them, but i would also add that a majority post from their real accounts, with their face as a profile picture, with little to no shame.

Outside of this, there needs to be a targeted effort to label and/or ban bots, but those bot accounts drive up user engagement numbers, which drive ad revenue, which makes line go up, so it's never going to happen. But doing so would limit how far these messages get and reduce foreign (or domestic) influence.

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lmmarsano -2 points 6 months ago

police the platforms

No thanks. The beauty of social media is the unrestrained assholery. People just need to learn to cope & quit being fragile: skill issue. Education & civic campaigns to promote social good are better approaches respecting our inherent liberties to piss people off.

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