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.
Some thoughts:
This is being done to earn someone profit, not to inform people but maybe entertain them a bit - but foremost, because someone buys advertisements on these platforms.
Courses of action:
Viability of different courses:
Users are diverse and numerous. Dealing with them is a lot of work.
The actions of malicious users may be an offense in some place, but not in another, and being rude is not an offense. Dealing with malicious users individually is feasible only in an environment where the general public is interested in peace of mind and orderly discussion. I have seen and still participate in such places. They are mostly non-profit forums wich a few clear administrators. Lemmy is an experiment in a similar direction. An algorithmically steered social media site run by a for-profit company... no, it does not fit this profile.
Education of non-malicious users - how to choose a good environment and defend oneself and others in this environment - may be more effective. Users should be informed about what benefits them. They should know that "environment A has effective moderation, while environment B is a troll cave". They should know that "environemnt A sends you information that you asked, while B pelts you with rage bait". Who should educate people about the environments they can choose? Obviously, schools.
Very large companies have to comply with EU DSA rules. They must show how they have effective moderation, prevent hateful content from propagating, are not harming minors, etc. I would prefer if all large companies were pressed towards effective moderation. It hurts their profit margin, but they must accept this is the price to pay for operating in a civilized society.
A particularly blunt instrument, recently touted in several countries, is outright banning of all underage people from social media. This is highly controversial. To the companies it sends a message: "if you cannot create a safe environment, we will take your future customers away, full stop". To others, it causes great inconvenience due to age verification, which is problematic. If age verification is in place, using social media for publishing something pseudonymously or anonymously becomes near impossible. I would not like that to happen.