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.
The algorithms in these social media services don't care about you actually wanting to watch the video or see the content in general, instead they hyperfixate on if you took 0.02 seconds longer before scrolling to the next one compared to the previous scrolls, to determine what should be shown.
For example, if your interests are exclusively in random gadgets and trinkets for example, but then it shows you a video of an onlyfans promotion, you may accidentally pause in confusion, then scroll, unknowingly triggering the algorithm to keep showing you onlyfans promotions despite you not wanting that.
And it’s the same if it’s offensive or triggering, the algorithm decides to keep showing you such content so it can stun you into staying in the app longer.
This is why I've decided to outsource my social media use to lemmy and geminispace BBS boards, because sure instagram can be enjoyable a lot of the time, but if you use it excessively, it’s damaging.
Also, pro tip: if you don’t use Insta for a month or so, it decides to show you the best content possible to try getting you hooked again, but once you get to a video which isn’t awfully enjoyable, close it and forget about it for another month. Mileage may vary but it works for me somehow, even if I’m likely to be AuDHD