Clothoff is a disgusting app, moreso that their service is being used to disrobe minors - and continues to allow it. Any legal repercussions they may face from allowing their service to be abused...
Clothoff is a disgusting app, moreso that their service is being used to disrobe minors - and continues to allow it.
Any legal repercussions they may face from allowing their service to be abused and used in crimes?
Honestly given that this is an unsolvable problem it tells you a lot about the people working on it. They knew this would be used in that way said "fuck it", and plowed ahead.
moreso that their service is being used to disrobe minors
Honestly given that this is an unsolvable problem it tells you a lot about the people working on it. They knew this would be used in that way said "fuck it", and plowed ahead.
I think the social implications are the more concerning—why has it come to this in the first place? This is the symptom, not the disease. (I don't know how this particular app works—I haven't...
I think the social implications are the more concerning—why has it come to this in the first place? This is the symptom, not the disease.
(I don't know how this particular app works—I haven't looked into it and I don't care to—but I am certain there are versions of it which are impossible to reasonably outlaw—https://tild.es/1akx sits right next to this thread on the front page...)
Thank you for calling out the elephant in the room: why are boys doing this their classmates? Why do they think it's OK to destroy girls in this way? 10+ years ago there was an incident of a boy...
I think the social implications are the more concerning—why has it come to this in the first place? This is the symptom, not the disease.
Thank you for calling out the elephant in the room: why are boys doing this their classmates? Why do they think it's OK to destroy girls in this way?
10+ years ago there was an incident of a boy in my high school pressuring his girlfriend into sending him a nude photo. Once she gave in, that photo was circulated to just about every boy at that school and it wasn't uncommon to see them gathered around a phone screen gawking. There were no repercussions for the boys, they treated the photo like some hunting trophy, and the girl had to move to another school.
So here we are with a huge advancement in technology and this is what boys and men choose to do with it! Not helping society, but instead generating content to be sexual trophies to harras girls and women with! Why is this their immediate go to action?!
Edited add ins:
This mindset of only viewing women and girls as sexual objects is disturbing. Even yesterday there was a post that made the top of Tildes yesterday that had a user convinced that false rape accusations are as high as 50/50. What is this type of AI going to do in those cases and affecting that horrible mindset? Want to paint a woman or girl as more promiscuous in a rape case and effectively "asking for it"? Just generate a bunch of AI photos and throw them in as evidence.
It's a terrible thing, the result is new, and I don't think every boy would do what they did. But I don't see it as particularly surprising that some boys would, given certain cultural phenomena:...
It's a terrible thing, the result is new, and I don't think every boy would do what they did. But I don't see it as particularly surprising that some boys would, given certain cultural phenomena:
Are teenage boys interested in photos of naked women? Yes, of course. They were interested before porn was readily available. Before the Internet, there were magazines that you couldn't buy yourself, but someone could, and there were stashes.
Would they be interested in seeing real women naked? Well, comic books would have ads for "X-ray glasses" along with the sea monkeys and other stuff like that. I expect nearly everyone knew they wouldn't work, but storytelling about "x-ray vision" was common.
(Many things people imagine would turn out to be a lot worse in real life. I remember watching a TV show about some kid that got magic X-ray specs and it turned out they let you see internal organs.)
Do boys tease girls? Certainly not new. Do they take stupid risks? Do they do hurtful things without thinking them through? I think, yes?
It's not particularly surprising that some of them went way too far, given that now it's easy to do.
It's the app that new. I don't think it's a cultural change. If anything, people care more about bullying than they used to.
(Also, until now I've been talking as if these things were universal, but cultural responses to the existence of such things will vary.)
This isn’t sitting right with me, skybrian. I know you don’t have any malicious intent here, but your post comes across as a “boys will be boys” explanation that’s very commonly used to downplay...
Exemplary
This isn’t sitting right with me, skybrian. I know you don’t have any malicious intent here, but your post comes across as a “boys will be boys” explanation that’s very commonly used to downplay sexual harassment (and worse).
The person you’re responding to is decrying an advancement in technology being used to implement age-old sexism and harassment, and your response is to say that it’s nothing new and is, in fact, expected. That’s exactly what’s frustrating @KneeFingers!
They’re frustrated that we haven’t societally moved past the idea that boys feel it’s okay to harass and objectify girls. They’re frustrated that the harmful actions that boys take get downplayed, while the harms that girls face as a result are intensified. In the story they shared, the boys got no consequences while the girl had to uproot her life and change schools. What was her big crime? Trusting her boyfriend. What was the boys’ big crime? Coercing her into taking nude pictures under false pretenses and then mass distributing them without her consent.
That situation captures one of the big, substantial imbalances of systemic sexism, and a major weight in that imbalance is the idea that harmful behavior from boys is just something that happens by accident or oversight instead of it being an actual conscious decision on their part.
Consider, for example, that your reasoning neatly arrives at its conclusion absent any sort of malice from the hypothetical boys in focus. You frame their behavior as a sort of logical error based on their development or some innate gender trait. It is true that some boys might make some earnest mistakes in this area, but stopping there misses another (and arguably far more common) scenario entirely: some boys will deliberately choose to do something like this. They are aware of the harms it causes and either do not care or, worse, want to inflict that harm in the first place.
An easy way to tell when someone makes a mistake is that they feel bad afterwards or want to pursue some sort of restitution when made aware of the harm they caused. Did the boys in KneeFingers’ story apologize or make things up to the girl? Did they try to create an environment in which she would want to stick around? Doubtful.
Meanwhile, an easy way to tell when someone is consciously choosing to do something they know is wrong is when they try to evade accountability for their behavior. The linked article has a person hiding their identity to carry out extortion:
She […] showed her mother a recent Instagram conversation she had with a boy. In it, he asks her to give him “some money.” When she refused, the boy immediately sent her a naked photo of herself. All she could do was block the contact. The police believe that there is a false profile behind this account.
That this is all so commonplace and recurrent is beyond frustrating — the linked article is merely a new instance of the same old shit that women have faced since time immemorial. It’s a sad indicator that we’re iterating on sexism instead of eradicating it.
I know you meant well with your comment, and I appreciate your consistently measured approach to difficult topics, but I think your comment here misses the mark enough that it strays into harmful territory. The problem in question isn’t a matter of boys stumbling unknowingly into unfortunate accidents: it’s a product of boys consciously choosing to disregard or outright destroy women’s feelings — either because they think they can get away with it, or because they genuinely want to.
I didn't mean my reply as a "boys will be boys" argument. Yes, it easily comes to mind and I thought of writing about it, and then skipped it because I was writing on my phone and decided that it...
I didn't mean my reply as a "boys will be boys" argument. Yes, it easily comes to mind and I thought of writing about it, and then skipped it because I was writing on my phone and decided that it would be getting too defensive. But let me expand on that:
I was responding very generally, not to individual stories but to broad cultural concerns, as expressed in the whole thread: what can we conclude about the broader culture of boys from personal stories and news events? Has that culture changed for the worse? And so I was describing some old, odd evidence of broad cultural attitudes, which doesn't say much of anything about specific cases. ("Culture made me do it" isn't a defense.)
We should be wary of the pitfalls of discussing things from such a zoomed-out viewpoint. Drawing general conclusions about kids everywhere from what some kids somewhere in Spain did doesn't work very well. And when we ask "did something change" we're being very vague about "since when?" My memories from when I was young really don't say a lot about "how things were before." It's generalizing from a few decidedly non-random data points.
But, to stick with this over-general discussion of cultural changes for a bit, I think culture does change, sometimes pretty significantly. Teachers and parents can do a lot to make sure that kids raised now don't inherit some bad cultural attitudes because they are different kids and each generation has at least somewhat of a chance to start things fresh. I assume things have changed enough that I feel rather out of touch with whatever is going on in schools.
Being able to start fresh gives some hope. Going along with that, though, there is sometimes a utopian impulse to say that since we're starting over, we can do it right this time. That makes it sound too easy, and I think results in unrealistic expectations? It's my impression that bad cultural attitudes can be very entrenched and even committed parents and teachers can only do so much. It seems like culture is quite a powerful force, smartphones are a powerful cultural transmitter, and there are plenty of other ways outside culture gets in.
There's a temptation to avoid it by keeping bad cultural influences out, maybe with gender-segregated schools or homeschooling or private schools or Internet firewalls or whatever. Maybe it works sometimes, if you're lucky. But as the urban legend goes, sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. The flip side of it being different kids is that kids in every year have to learn the same lessons all over again about how to be decent human beings, even when the people around them are being shits. (And that's not even the ones who are instigating it.)
It is indeed the same old shit, and it's frustrating, and I'm sure I don't know the half of it.
Regarding what certain boys intended at certain times, I think that's better left to local investigations to deal with. I'm not sure if we even want to talk about individual stories in the amount of detail it would take to really understand them? Speaking generally, I agree that avoiding accountability shows that they knew it would get them "in trouble" (though not necessarily having a full understanding of that) and that showing remorse is a good sign (though even some kids can learn to fake it.)
I don't really want to rehash a locked thread, but that is not an accurate representation of what was said. I think we (collectively) could really do a lot better at reading what everyone else is...
Even yesterday there was a post that made the top of Tildes yesterday that had a user convinced that false rape accusations are as high as 50/50.
I don't really want to rehash a locked thread, but that is not an accurate representation of what was said. I think we (collectively) could really do a lot better at reading what everyone else is saying rather than skimming and let our minds fill in the blanks for us.
Also fwiw, most comments will bump a post to the top of Tildes under the default sorting method, so I wouldn't read too much into post order.
I think a lot of it has to do with the death of shame and the rise of moral relativism. There is no shame anymore. And whether it was brought about by religious beliefs or just very strict moral...
I think a lot of it has to do with the death of shame and the rise of moral relativism.
There is no shame anymore. And whether it was brought about by religious beliefs or just very strict moral codes, it had a useful place in the past. As a senior, I can't even imagine a boy bringing a picture of a naked classmate to school back in the 70s. Maybe a torn out page from a Penthouse, but not a classmate. That boy would've been called out by the other boys, as being a "pervert" for that shocking action and the disgust from staff and parents alike would've been universal. But there are no "perverts" anymore - everything has been reduced to "choices" and "non judgment" and "rights" so that no one feels they can call out someone for being immoral.
Well, I think you are plainly wrong. Every young man is terrified of being labelled a pervert, outside of an incredibly loud minority of deeply disturbed individuals. Every young woman is ashamed...
Well, I think you are plainly wrong. Every young man is terrified of being labelled a pervert, outside of an incredibly loud minority of deeply disturbed individuals. Every young woman is ashamed of her body, and despite the sexual rerevolution of the past few years, almost all of them are ashamed of their own desires.
Online, there are no perverts, because there's such clean division between SFW and NSFW spaces that the label becomes either superfluous or libellous. In real life, sexuality is incredibly taboo, and just because your classmates would've been beaten for looking at porn doesn't mean that kids nowadays aren't callling the kids passing around nudes scumbags. Which they are.
Hmm... I have a very close relative who is a teacher in a pretty conservative area and he recently commented that even 4 years ago, if a boy was caught showing nudes he received to other kids, he...
Hmm... I have a very close relative who is a teacher in a pretty conservative area and he recently commented that even 4 years ago, if a boy was caught showing nudes he received to other kids, he would be hauled down to the office, parents called and it would be a 'big deal' for discipline. This last year he asked his vice principal why the last time it happened there was nothing more than a 'tsk, tsk' from a staff member and the vp said, with a sigh, that it was now so common that if he disciplined every kid who did it, there would be no end to kids he'd have to call out.
So if kids are calling those kids scumbags in your area, great, but my guess is that's not the norm anymore. It's so commonplace that even kids consider it fairly innocuous.
Yeah, maybe that's changed since my sister finished high school. I still think your initial diagnosis is off-base. At most, I think you could say that crimes of impropriety have become shameless,...
Yeah, maybe that's changed since my sister finished high school. I still think your initial diagnosis is off-base. At most, I think you could say that crimes of impropriety have become shameless, but then I think we'll have to blame our surveillance capitalists for that.
I don't think "shame" is an effective mechanism for preventing (sexual) violence against women. Firstly, I am not convinced that the 70s were really "better" for women's rights/position in...
I don't think "shame" is an effective mechanism for preventing (sexual) violence against women. Firstly, I am not convinced that the 70s were really "better" for women's rights/position in society. I also really don't think that religious morality helps to stop women being subjected to denigration and abuse.
I don't know what does work (I'm a young man for context, so have never experienced any of the really horrible things women go through on a daily basis, and didn't know about until my female friends told me about things in their day-to-day lives previously unimaginable for me – sure, I was aware of them in the abstract, but not how prevalent they were, and that they're not just distant things), but I think some things are more effective
Banning this app!!! Immediately.
smartphone ban in schools (reduces some of the pressures of social media)
taking claims of sexual violence/assult seriously
not accepting misbehaviour from boys/young men as a "oh they'll grow out of it" or "boys will be boys" kind of thing – it's essential that it is treated seriously and not accepted
teaching boys (from an early age) to treat women with respect and not to just see them as some "other" that comes into being only through the focal lense of sexual interest
Friendly reminder that women in the US could not get credit cards in their own name until 1974! Also you could lose your job for being pregnant until 1993. I'm honestly a lot less charitable than...
Firstly, I am not convinced that the 70s were really "better" for women's rights/position in society.
Friendly reminder that women in the US could not get credit cards in their own name until 1974! Also you could lose your job for being pregnant until 1993.
I'm honestly a lot less charitable than you are -- I don't think someone who believes things are worse today than in the 70s because we "everything has been reduced to 'choices' and 'non judgment' and 'rights'" is someone who I can have a productive discussion with. But that's probably in part because I'm both assigned female at birth and trans, and I doubt someone who believes that things were as good or better in the 70s has much empathy for anyone in those groups.
I mean... define "younger people"? I was on the internet in the early 90s, and porn was easily available then as well. If something is different about teenagers now as opposed to then, it's not...
I mean... define "younger people"? I was on the internet in the early 90s, and porn was easily available then as well. If something is different about teenagers now as opposed to then, it's not porn accessibility.
That's where this goes back to the notion that this a symptom of a societal issue with boys and men. We keep hearing about a loneliness epidemic amongst men, but in a way it's a result of women...
That's where this goes back to the notion that this a symptom of a societal issue with boys and men. We keep hearing about a loneliness epidemic amongst men, but in a way it's a result of women and girls determining their own self-worth and not putting up with old norms. Instead of changing their behavior and learning, they are instead doubling down and becoming more extreme. Why? There is research, articles, so much commentary, and more that is out there to explain why and the path forward. But those things are actively ignored by those who need to hear it most, and peer pressure of the larger group falling into it causes others to fall-in despite good intentions to prevent it from parents. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force them to drink. These men and boys literally will not entertain that this stuff is not only harmful for women and girls, but them too.
There is something deeply ingrained and toxic in how the majority of men and boys fall into this thinking. It is hard not to feel it is retribution for all of the strides women and girls have attained.
I'm not sure anything close to a majority fall into the toxic thinking you're describing. Loneliness has gone up for more reasons than teenagers suddenly becoming antisocial misandrists. If...
I'm not sure anything close to a majority fall into the toxic thinking you're describing. Loneliness has gone up for more reasons than teenagers suddenly becoming antisocial misandrists. If anything, the average teenager today is significantly more egalitarian! Think of how queer people are treated now compared to even 20 years ago.
I find it difficult to believe that a younger teenager is consciously engaging in this sort of activity in retribution for all of the strides women and girls have attained and their unwillingness...
I find it difficult to believe that a younger teenager is consciously engaging in this sort of activity in retribution for all of the strides women and girls have attained and their unwillingness to engage in the old status quo. If teenage boys are attempting retribution against teenage girls, it's because of a larger cultural movement of gender revanchism that's teaching them that they've lost something that they never knew themselves. I don't know how or if it's possible to actually choke out those sorts of narratives. Revanchist thought is seductive as it centers them as justified in the actions they take, even as they've never been personally wronged. How do you beat a philosophy that tells people that they're right to take what they want and that there's a group of people whose purpose is to serve them? Only through extensive, repeated, painful lessons that teach them that the selfish philosophy won't ever get them what they want. And that's hard on everyone around them as well.
Biiiig difference between only being able to access it on the family computer (often in the living room or another common area) where anyone walking past can see what you’re doing and a device...
Biiiig difference between only being able to access it on the family computer (often in the living room or another common area) where anyone walking past can see what you’re doing and a device that you can access it on in the privacy of your bedroom at any time, though.
"Internet in the early 90s" and "readily available" don't really fit, unless spending 3 hours to download a 30 second 240p clip only to have it fail at 90% because someone picked up the phone...
"Internet in the early 90s" and "readily available" don't really fit, unless spending 3 hours to download a 30 second 240p clip only to have it fail at 90% because someone picked up the phone counts as "readily" to you lol ;)
Nah, it was more like "queue up 50 images, and pray they don't all fail a third of the way down the image, leaving you with a sultry eyebrow and a large blank space." But someone picking up the...
Nah, it was more like "queue up 50 images, and pray they don't all fail a third of the way down the image, leaving you with a sultry eyebrow and a large blank space." But someone picking up the phone was the bane of my existence until I started to pay for a dedicated line.
The difference is in the caliber of terminally-online teenagers. When we were kids, it took a nerdy type to be online all the time. These days, it’s everyone, average and below included.
The difference is in the caliber of terminally-online teenagers. When we were kids, it took a nerdy type to be online all the time. These days, it’s everyone, average and below included.
I think it's a bit of a cheap shot to "blame the parents" – most parents I know have trouble using their own phones, let alone regulating their children's phone use. Generally a lot are super...
I think it's a bit of a cheap shot to "blame the parents" – most parents I know have trouble using their own phones, let alone regulating their children's phone use. Generally a lot are super busy, and some responsibility needs to be on tech companies to (even at the expense of their profits) reduce the harm they cause. I think that children under the age of 13 shouldn't have smartphones (Nokia brick is fine and works for everything they need to do), and sure parents can regulate this. However, a lot of the mechanisms that parents are offered for controlling their children's phone use is quite flawed – e.g. YouTube Kids is well-known for a whole host of really concerning things (auto-suggesting far-right and ISIS videos).
IANAL, this is an interesting question. You could argue that the app is meant as a joke between friends and only to be used with consent of the person. If the company was smart, they would include...
IANAL, this is an interesting question. You could argue that the app is meant as a joke between friends and only to be used with consent of the person. If the company was smart, they would include the matter of consent in their TOS. They could argue that if their service is abused to disrobe minors, its fault lies with the perpetrator.
The question is whether that will hold up. Pirate Bay or Mega in Europe are great examples. While these services have a legitimate base (sharing files through torrent or a storage platform isn't illegal if there is no copyright infringement), most courts have ruled that the majority uses the service for downloading of copyrighted material.
And then comes the next issue: pirate bay is blocked in many countries. In the Netherlands, the ISPs are (by court order) blocking urls to the pirate bay. But it is nothing more than a DNS-level block and you don't have to be that tech-savy to circumvent such a block.
Even if ClothOff app would face legal consequences, the apk package is probably already floating around the more grey areas of the internet. It won't stop people using it.
Hence, efforts should be made to go after perpetrators that use these apps to embarrass or blackmail others and those who participate in the distribution of those pictures. The new Digital Service Act in Europe is a step forwards as it requires cooperation from Instagram to find the people behind these blackmail accounts.
But also schools and parents play a role. I don't have kids, but if I would and found out my son was participating in these kind of activities, he would find himself without a smartphone/tablet/computer for a long time plus some serious education on the consequences of his actions.
And I think therein lies the last problem: parents involvement in what kids do online is relatively low and therefore supervision of a kids dumb, evil and not-full-grown brain that cannot foresee consequences is lacking.
I am really hoping there are going to be more effective tools for parents to manage their kids internet and screen usage by the time I have kids old enough to use these on their old.
I am really hoping there are going to be more effective tools for parents to manage their kids internet and screen usage by the time I have kids old enough to use these on their old.
There are some effective tools today, but they take time to set up and manage, as well as some monetary investment to get the best tools. I have three kids, oldest is 10, and I let them use...
There are some effective tools today, but they take time to set up and manage, as well as some monetary investment to get the best tools.
I have three kids, oldest is 10, and I let them use Internet connected devices. I have a protrctli hardware device with untangle/Arista firewall installed. It does have a license cost, either $50 or $150 a year depending on the features you want. But you can do tls inspection (involved installing root cert on the kids devices), content filtering, dynamic domain blackholing, dynamic session tagging, etc. I pair this with a bitdefender pro 10 pack license which has good (not great) parental control app features including MDM-lite.
Sure, there are ways to get around some of these blocks, so I also have regular conversations with my kids about the importance of safety, etc. I make sure they have lots of places they can go and have fun so they aren't too tempted to get too find workarounds.
For example, I let them use Spotify, but block YouTube (both for content reasons, but also they kept getting sucked into shorts. I want them to have active digital recreation, not passive media consumption), I whitelist some specific game sites that the content filter would otherwise block (likely due to ad content), but I also force the use of filtered DNS lists through adguard and the firewall, blocking the probably ads.
So you can layer some really good controls today, but it takes a fair bit of work to get going. I used to be the director of engineering for a large organization, including the network engineers (lan, wan, campus, and data center), so a lot of the home setup was an extension of my day job.
Exactly, the ultimate hole in the filter is when they go out to the real world. The hope is that you keep things like whatever today's version of rotten.com is out of their reach until they...
Exactly, the ultimate hole in the filter is when they go out to the real world. The hope is that you keep things like whatever today's version of rotten.com is out of their reach until they develop enough to have meaningful talks about unpleasant things in the world.
Growing up I remember friends whose parents banned south park. It didn't stop them from watching it, it just kept the parents in the dark. Once kids hit middle school, you need to strike a careful balance that let's then have their freedom while also keeping some broad guard rails in place. The content filters are great in elementary school, but need to be replaced with talks and education over time.
It's great that you are able to provide that for your kids, and unfortunate that a reasonable degree of curation requires the parent to have professional level skills in order to provide it for...
It's great that you are able to provide that for your kids, and unfortunate that a reasonable degree of curation requires the parent to have professional level skills in order to provide it for theirs.
Yes and no. The professional knowledge is of course helpful. However, buying the bitdefender 10 pack is designed for non technical customers. There are also other firewalls that are even easier to...
Yes and no. The professional knowledge is of course helpful. However, buying the bitdefender 10 pack is designed for non technical customers. There are also other firewalls that are even easier to configure with content blocks and many Internet service providers allow our even default to content filtered DNS servers.
I think you might be really overestimating what the average level of knowledge is in this area. I only vaguely know what a firewall is, and don’t at all know what a DNS server is. When my kids are...
I think you might be really overestimating what the average level of knowledge is in this area. I only vaguely know what a firewall is, and don’t at all know what a DNS server is. When my kids are old enough to start being online unsupervised I’ll be probably relying on parental control settings on iphones.
All this to say I think the key for many of us non-techy types is communication over control. Encourage your kids to talk about what they’re doing online, let them know what the dangers are, set some boundaries so they aren’t online every minute they’re awake, and then hope for the best.
The technical controls are best for when they are young, elementary school aged, and you want them to be able to explore without ruining into something horrible. It has to be paired with...
The technical controls are best for when they are young, elementary school aged, and you want them to be able to explore without ruining into something horrible. It has to be paired with communication, as once they get to middle school and go over to friends houses, you won't be there. However, I've found the controls helpful in facilitating communication, because when my kids get to a blocked page, we sit and talk about why it was blocked and whether it would be a good idea to unblock it or not. Some we whitelist, and others we agree to keep blocked. It's difficult for kids to develop good Internet practices of you can't let them run loose on the harness a bit.
As for the technical controls being difficult, I think the greatest barrier is knowing they exist. There are many non-techy focused products out there, and of you Google "parental control apps" or "home Internet content block" you will find them (and then need to self educate and soft through them). For some it isn't worth the time or money and they will have other strategies. Unfortunately, there will be some who take rather draconian approaches, such as someone I know not allowing their kids online at all and they aren't allowed to watch shows with words, not even things like Pocoyo.
all the tools in the world wont matter if distracted and uneducated parents have no will or initiative to have difficult and awkward conversations with their kids. fewer and fewer people know how...
all the tools in the world wont matter if distracted and uneducated parents have no will or initiative to have difficult and awkward conversations with their kids. fewer and fewer people know how to actually parent these days, and that is partly due to the world getting more complex every moment. it is very hard to keep up with understanding it for yourself, let alone being able to distill the important points into something that can be digested by a developing brain.
Yeah, at some point the kids will have access to unfiltered Internet. At some point you need to explain why you block things at home, and transition to building awareness and understanding rather...
Yeah, at some point the kids will have access to unfiltered Internet. At some point you need to explain why you block things at home, and transition to building awareness and understanding rather than blocking content. I'm going to need to start explaining more to my oldest as they start middle school next year and start doing more things like sleepovers, etc.
i wish you the best of luck. i think the most important lessons to convey are compassion/empathy (even when not reciprocated) and critical thinking. if that foundation can be established, then the...
i wish you the best of luck. i think the most important lessons to convey are compassion/empathy (even when not reciprocated) and critical thinking. if that foundation can be established, then the appropriate responses to the variety of issues that arise can be handled well enough. the problem lies with the eroding social norms and the increasing rarity of accepted truths.
Manuel Viejo While the police investigate, the mothers of the affected have organized to take action and try to stop those responsible. Gómez suffered an anxiety attack. Later, she had a...
Manuel Viejo
While the police investigate, the mothers of the affected have organized to take action and try to stop those responsible.
Gómez suffered an anxiety attack. Later, she had a conversation with her daughter: “Do you know anything about a naked photo?” The girl did not hesitate. She said yes, and showed her mother a recent Instagram conversation she had with a boy. In it, he asks her to give him “some money.” When she refused, the boy immediately sent her a naked photo of herself. All she could do was block the contact. The police believe that there is a false profile behind this account. (tap to read more)
As the number of affected girls kept increasing, the group of mothers kept growing. One of the mothers is Miriam Al Adib, a 46-year-old gynecologist. She has an Instagram profile with more than 120,000 followers. There, last Sunday, she made a live stream to talk about what had just happened at her home. The video already has more than 70,000 views. “I just got back from a trip; this is very serious, and I have to share it,” she says.
Al Adib, who has four daughters between 12 and 17 years old, tells EL PAÍS that she had just arrived from a trip from Barcelona, where she went to give some talks on female sexual health. After eating, her 14-year-old daughter approached her and said: “Mom, look at what happened. They have done this to many girls.” Then the girl showed her the photo of herself naked. “My heart skipped a beat,” Al Adib says. “If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, this photo looks real.”
That is when a mother decided to create a WhatsApp group to better coordinate with everyone. That Monday, there were already 27 people in the group.
The case is being investigated by the Almendralejo judicial police. In fact, they have already identified “several” of the alleged authors of the photographic montages, according to officials. The case has been placed in the hands of the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office.
The investigation, according to police sources, remains open. The photo of one of the minors included a fly; that is the logo of Clothoff, the application that is presumably being used to create the images, which promotes its services with the slogan: “Undress anybody with our free service!”
Related - Is digital violence in an AI era yet another threat to women?
by Noor Mahtani
A hundred apps creating hyperrealistic erotic images are being flagged up by experts who are pushing for comprehensive public policies and criminalization (tap to read more)
Nowadays, anyone can create a hyperrealistic porn video with artificial intelligence (AI). All it takes is a photo, an email and between $10 and $50. These are the only requirements for the 96 apps already in existence to receive “compelling nudity” on tap for a year. “It’ll be a piece of cake to add someone to a porn scene,” says the website of one of the most popular apps, with 1.5 million monthly visits. “This is the crème de la crème because of how easy and powerful it is,” says another. It is precisely the ease of generating content without consent and sharing it that worries experts in the Latin American region where, in some countries, digital gender-based violence is hardly considered a crime and where commitment to its prevention is flaky to say the least.
“It’s incredibly easy to create the hottest girls with just a few words, making them do what you tell them. Go crazy!” says a forum that compares “deepfake porn” apps, which gives a very high score to an application that creates sexy avatars of women with user-supplied photos for a fee. In order for the images it produces not to be blurred, you have to subscribe. It costs less than $10. Ramirez, a Mexican litigator, believes that the key to nailing these cases is in proving responsibility: “This debate is only being had by analysts, not politicians,” he says. “In Mexico, there has never been a restriction on apps or social networks. And, honestly, I don’t see it coming.”
Clothoff is a disgusting app, moreso that their service is being used to disrobe minors - and continues to allow it.
Any legal repercussions they may face from allowing their service to be abused and used in crimes?
Honestly given that this is an unsolvable problem it tells you a lot about the people working on it. They knew this would be used in that way said "fuck it", and plowed ahead.
Where are all the people who are always very worried about pedophilia now I wonder?
I think the social implications are the more concerning—why has it come to this in the first place? This is the symptom, not the disease.
(I don't know how this particular app works—I haven't looked into it and I don't care to—but I am certain there are versions of it which are impossible to reasonably outlaw—https://tild.es/1akx sits right next to this thread on the front page...)
Thank you for calling out the elephant in the room: why are boys doing this their classmates? Why do they think it's OK to destroy girls in this way?
10+ years ago there was an incident of a boy in my high school pressuring his girlfriend into sending him a nude photo. Once she gave in, that photo was circulated to just about every boy at that school and it wasn't uncommon to see them gathered around a phone screen gawking. There were no repercussions for the boys, they treated the photo like some hunting trophy, and the girl had to move to another school.
So here we are with a huge advancement in technology and this is what boys and men choose to do with it! Not helping society, but instead generating content to be sexual trophies to harras girls and women with! Why is this their immediate go to action?!
Edited add ins:
This mindset of only viewing women and girls as sexual objects is disturbing. Even yesterday there was a post that made the top of Tildes yesterday that had a user convinced that false rape accusations are as high as 50/50. What is this type of AI going to do in those cases and affecting that horrible mindset? Want to paint a woman or girl as more promiscuous in a rape case and effectively "asking for it"? Just generate a bunch of AI photos and throw them in as evidence.
Edit: had more thoughts to add.
It's a terrible thing, the result is new, and I don't think every boy would do what they did. But I don't see it as particularly surprising that some boys would, given certain cultural phenomena:
Are teenage boys interested in photos of naked women? Yes, of course. They were interested before porn was readily available. Before the Internet, there were magazines that you couldn't buy yourself, but someone could, and there were stashes.
Would they be interested in seeing real women naked? Well, comic books would have ads for "X-ray glasses" along with the sea monkeys and other stuff like that. I expect nearly everyone knew they wouldn't work, but storytelling about "x-ray vision" was common.
(Many things people imagine would turn out to be a lot worse in real life. I remember watching a TV show about some kid that got magic X-ray specs and it turned out they let you see internal organs.)
Do boys tease girls? Certainly not new. Do they take stupid risks? Do they do hurtful things without thinking them through? I think, yes?
It's not particularly surprising that some of them went way too far, given that now it's easy to do.
It's the app that new. I don't think it's a cultural change. If anything, people care more about bullying than they used to.
(Also, until now I've been talking as if these things were universal, but cultural responses to the existence of such things will vary.)
This isn’t sitting right with me, skybrian. I know you don’t have any malicious intent here, but your post comes across as a “boys will be boys” explanation that’s very commonly used to downplay sexual harassment (and worse).
The person you’re responding to is decrying an advancement in technology being used to implement age-old sexism and harassment, and your response is to say that it’s nothing new and is, in fact, expected. That’s exactly what’s frustrating @KneeFingers!
They’re frustrated that we haven’t societally moved past the idea that boys feel it’s okay to harass and objectify girls. They’re frustrated that the harmful actions that boys take get downplayed, while the harms that girls face as a result are intensified. In the story they shared, the boys got no consequences while the girl had to uproot her life and change schools. What was her big crime? Trusting her boyfriend. What was the boys’ big crime? Coercing her into taking nude pictures under false pretenses and then mass distributing them without her consent.
That situation captures one of the big, substantial imbalances of systemic sexism, and a major weight in that imbalance is the idea that harmful behavior from boys is just something that happens by accident or oversight instead of it being an actual conscious decision on their part.
Consider, for example, that your reasoning neatly arrives at its conclusion absent any sort of malice from the hypothetical boys in focus. You frame their behavior as a sort of logical error based on their development or some innate gender trait. It is true that some boys might make some earnest mistakes in this area, but stopping there misses another (and arguably far more common) scenario entirely: some boys will deliberately choose to do something like this. They are aware of the harms it causes and either do not care or, worse, want to inflict that harm in the first place.
An easy way to tell when someone makes a mistake is that they feel bad afterwards or want to pursue some sort of restitution when made aware of the harm they caused. Did the boys in KneeFingers’ story apologize or make things up to the girl? Did they try to create an environment in which she would want to stick around? Doubtful.
Meanwhile, an easy way to tell when someone is consciously choosing to do something they know is wrong is when they try to evade accountability for their behavior. The linked article has a person hiding their identity to carry out extortion:
That this is all so commonplace and recurrent is beyond frustrating — the linked article is merely a new instance of the same old shit that women have faced since time immemorial. It’s a sad indicator that we’re iterating on sexism instead of eradicating it.
I know you meant well with your comment, and I appreciate your consistently measured approach to difficult topics, but I think your comment here misses the mark enough that it strays into harmful territory. The problem in question isn’t a matter of boys stumbling unknowingly into unfortunate accidents: it’s a product of boys consciously choosing to disregard or outright destroy women’s feelings — either because they think they can get away with it, or because they genuinely want to.
I didn't mean my reply as a "boys will be boys" argument. Yes, it easily comes to mind and I thought of writing about it, and then skipped it because I was writing on my phone and decided that it would be getting too defensive. But let me expand on that:
I was responding very generally, not to individual stories but to broad cultural concerns, as expressed in the whole thread: what can we conclude about the broader culture of boys from personal stories and news events? Has that culture changed for the worse? And so I was describing some old, odd evidence of broad cultural attitudes, which doesn't say much of anything about specific cases. ("Culture made me do it" isn't a defense.)
We should be wary of the pitfalls of discussing things from such a zoomed-out viewpoint. Drawing general conclusions about kids everywhere from what some kids somewhere in Spain did doesn't work very well. And when we ask "did something change" we're being very vague about "since when?" My memories from when I was young really don't say a lot about "how things were before." It's generalizing from a few decidedly non-random data points.
But, to stick with this over-general discussion of cultural changes for a bit, I think culture does change, sometimes pretty significantly. Teachers and parents can do a lot to make sure that kids raised now don't inherit some bad cultural attitudes because they are different kids and each generation has at least somewhat of a chance to start things fresh. I assume things have changed enough that I feel rather out of touch with whatever is going on in schools.
Being able to start fresh gives some hope. Going along with that, though, there is sometimes a utopian impulse to say that since we're starting over, we can do it right this time. That makes it sound too easy, and I think results in unrealistic expectations? It's my impression that bad cultural attitudes can be very entrenched and even committed parents and teachers can only do so much. It seems like culture is quite a powerful force, smartphones are a powerful cultural transmitter, and there are plenty of other ways outside culture gets in.
There's a temptation to avoid it by keeping bad cultural influences out, maybe with gender-segregated schools or homeschooling or private schools or Internet firewalls or whatever. Maybe it works sometimes, if you're lucky. But as the urban legend goes, sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. The flip side of it being different kids is that kids in every year have to learn the same lessons all over again about how to be decent human beings, even when the people around them are being shits. (And that's not even the ones who are instigating it.)
It is indeed the same old shit, and it's frustrating, and I'm sure I don't know the half of it.
Regarding what certain boys intended at certain times, I think that's better left to local investigations to deal with. I'm not sure if we even want to talk about individual stories in the amount of detail it would take to really understand them? Speaking generally, I agree that avoiding accountability shows that they knew it would get them "in trouble" (though not necessarily having a full understanding of that) and that showing remorse is a good sign (though even some kids can learn to fake it.)
I don't really want to rehash a locked thread, but that is not an accurate representation of what was said. I think we (collectively) could really do a lot better at reading what everyone else is saying rather than skimming and let our minds fill in the blanks for us.
Also fwiw, most comments will bump a post to the top of Tildes under the default sorting method, so I wouldn't read too much into post order.
I think a lot of it has to do with the death of shame and the rise of moral relativism.
There is no shame anymore. And whether it was brought about by religious beliefs or just very strict moral codes, it had a useful place in the past. As a senior, I can't even imagine a boy bringing a picture of a naked classmate to school back in the 70s. Maybe a torn out page from a Penthouse, but not a classmate. That boy would've been called out by the other boys, as being a "pervert" for that shocking action and the disgust from staff and parents alike would've been universal. But there are no "perverts" anymore - everything has been reduced to "choices" and "non judgment" and "rights" so that no one feels they can call out someone for being immoral.
I don't see the improvement.
Can I ask your age? Because as a US zillennial, shame is ubiquitous in my cohort, and the younger.
Well, I think you are plainly wrong. Every young man is terrified of being labelled a pervert, outside of an incredibly loud minority of deeply disturbed individuals. Every young woman is ashamed of her body, and despite the sexual rerevolution of the past few years, almost all of them are ashamed of their own desires.
Online, there are no perverts, because there's such clean division between SFW and NSFW spaces that the label becomes either superfluous or libellous. In real life, sexuality is incredibly taboo, and just because your classmates would've been beaten for looking at porn doesn't mean that kids nowadays aren't callling the kids passing around nudes scumbags. Which they are.
Hmm... I have a very close relative who is a teacher in a pretty conservative area and he recently commented that even 4 years ago, if a boy was caught showing nudes he received to other kids, he would be hauled down to the office, parents called and it would be a 'big deal' for discipline. This last year he asked his vice principal why the last time it happened there was nothing more than a 'tsk, tsk' from a staff member and the vp said, with a sigh, that it was now so common that if he disciplined every kid who did it, there would be no end to kids he'd have to call out.
So if kids are calling those kids scumbags in your area, great, but my guess is that's not the norm anymore. It's so commonplace that even kids consider it fairly innocuous.
Yeah, maybe that's changed since my sister finished high school. I still think your initial diagnosis is off-base. At most, I think you could say that crimes of impropriety have become shameless, but then I think we'll have to blame our surveillance capitalists for that.
I don't think "shame" is an effective mechanism for preventing (sexual) violence against women. Firstly, I am not convinced that the 70s were really "better" for women's rights/position in society. I also really don't think that religious morality helps to stop women being subjected to denigration and abuse.
I don't know what does work (I'm a young man for context, so have never experienced any of the really horrible things women go through on a daily basis, and didn't know about until my female friends told me about things in their day-to-day lives previously unimaginable for me – sure, I was aware of them in the abstract, but not how prevalent they were, and that they're not just distant things), but I think some things are more effective
Friendly reminder that women in the US could not get credit cards in their own name until 1974! Also you could lose your job for being pregnant until 1993.
I'm honestly a lot less charitable than you are -- I don't think someone who believes things are worse today than in the 70s because we "everything has been reduced to 'choices' and 'non judgment' and 'rights'" is someone who I can have a productive discussion with. But that's probably in part because I'm both assigned female at birth and trans, and I doubt someone who believes that things were as good or better in the 70s has much empathy for anyone in those groups.
I mean... define "younger people"? I was on the internet in the early 90s, and porn was easily available then as well. If something is different about teenagers now as opposed to then, it's not porn accessibility.
That's where this goes back to the notion that this a symptom of a societal issue with boys and men. We keep hearing about a loneliness epidemic amongst men, but in a way it's a result of women and girls determining their own self-worth and not putting up with old norms. Instead of changing their behavior and learning, they are instead doubling down and becoming more extreme. Why? There is research, articles, so much commentary, and more that is out there to explain why and the path forward. But those things are actively ignored by those who need to hear it most, and peer pressure of the larger group falling into it causes others to fall-in despite good intentions to prevent it from parents. As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't force them to drink. These men and boys literally will not entertain that this stuff is not only harmful for women and girls, but them too.
There is something deeply ingrained and toxic in how the majority of men and boys fall into this thinking. It is hard not to feel it is retribution for all of the strides women and girls have attained.
I'm not sure anything close to a majority fall into the toxic thinking you're describing. Loneliness has gone up for more reasons than teenagers suddenly becoming antisocial misandrists. If anything, the average teenager today is significantly more egalitarian! Think of how queer people are treated now compared to even 20 years ago.
I find it difficult to believe that a younger teenager is consciously engaging in this sort of activity in retribution for all of the strides women and girls have attained and their unwillingness to engage in the old status quo. If teenage boys are attempting retribution against teenage girls, it's because of a larger cultural movement of gender revanchism that's teaching them that they've lost something that they never knew themselves. I don't know how or if it's possible to actually choke out those sorts of narratives. Revanchist thought is seductive as it centers them as justified in the actions they take, even as they've never been personally wronged. How do you beat a philosophy that tells people that they're right to take what they want and that there's a group of people whose purpose is to serve them? Only through extensive, repeated, painful lessons that teach them that the selfish philosophy won't ever get them what they want. And that's hard on everyone around them as well.
Biiiig difference between only being able to access it on the family computer (often in the living room or another common area) where anyone walking past can see what you’re doing and a device that you can access it on in the privacy of your bedroom at any time, though.
"Internet in the early 90s" and "readily available" don't really fit, unless spending 3 hours to download a 30 second 240p clip only to have it fail at 90% because someone picked up the phone counts as "readily" to you lol ;)
Nah, it was more like "queue up 50 images, and pray they don't all fail a third of the way down the image, leaving you with a sultry eyebrow and a large blank space." But someone picking up the phone was the bane of my existence until I started to pay for a dedicated line.
The difference is in the caliber of terminally-online teenagers. When we were kids, it took a nerdy type to be online all the time. These days, it’s everyone, average and below included.
Late Gen Z. I believe they are too early for Gen Alpha.
I think it's a bit of a cheap shot to "blame the parents" – most parents I know have trouble using their own phones, let alone regulating their children's phone use. Generally a lot are super busy, and some responsibility needs to be on tech companies to (even at the expense of their profits) reduce the harm they cause. I think that children under the age of 13 shouldn't have smartphones (Nokia brick is fine and works for everything they need to do), and sure parents can regulate this. However, a lot of the mechanisms that parents are offered for controlling their children's phone use is quite flawed – e.g. YouTube Kids is well-known for a whole host of really concerning things (auto-suggesting far-right and ISIS videos).
IANAL, this is an interesting question. You could argue that the app is meant as a joke between friends and only to be used with consent of the person. If the company was smart, they would include the matter of consent in their TOS. They could argue that if their service is abused to disrobe minors, its fault lies with the perpetrator.
The question is whether that will hold up. Pirate Bay or Mega in Europe are great examples. While these services have a legitimate base (sharing files through torrent or a storage platform isn't illegal if there is no copyright infringement), most courts have ruled that the majority uses the service for downloading of copyrighted material.
And then comes the next issue: pirate bay is blocked in many countries. In the Netherlands, the ISPs are (by court order) blocking urls to the pirate bay. But it is nothing more than a DNS-level block and you don't have to be that tech-savy to circumvent such a block.
Even if ClothOff app would face legal consequences, the apk package is probably already floating around the more grey areas of the internet. It won't stop people using it.
Hence, efforts should be made to go after perpetrators that use these apps to embarrass or blackmail others and those who participate in the distribution of those pictures. The new Digital Service Act in Europe is a step forwards as it requires cooperation from Instagram to find the people behind these blackmail accounts.
But also schools and parents play a role. I don't have kids, but if I would and found out my son was participating in these kind of activities, he would find himself without a smartphone/tablet/computer for a long time plus some serious education on the consequences of his actions.
And I think therein lies the last problem: parents involvement in what kids do online is relatively low and therefore supervision of a kids dumb, evil and not-full-grown brain that cannot foresee consequences is lacking.
I am really hoping there are going to be more effective tools for parents to manage their kids internet and screen usage by the time I have kids old enough to use these on their old.
There are some effective tools today, but they take time to set up and manage, as well as some monetary investment to get the best tools.
I have three kids, oldest is 10, and I let them use Internet connected devices. I have a protrctli hardware device with untangle/Arista firewall installed. It does have a license cost, either $50 or $150 a year depending on the features you want. But you can do tls inspection (involved installing root cert on the kids devices), content filtering, dynamic domain blackholing, dynamic session tagging, etc. I pair this with a bitdefender pro 10 pack license which has good (not great) parental control app features including MDM-lite.
Sure, there are ways to get around some of these blocks, so I also have regular conversations with my kids about the importance of safety, etc. I make sure they have lots of places they can go and have fun so they aren't too tempted to get too find workarounds.
For example, I let them use Spotify, but block YouTube (both for content reasons, but also they kept getting sucked into shorts. I want them to have active digital recreation, not passive media consumption), I whitelist some specific game sites that the content filter would otherwise block (likely due to ad content), but I also force the use of filtered DNS lists through adguard and the firewall, blocking the probably ads.
So you can layer some really good controls today, but it takes a fair bit of work to get going. I used to be the director of engineering for a large organization, including the network engineers (lan, wan, campus, and data center), so a lot of the home setup was an extension of my day job.
Exactly, the ultimate hole in the filter is when they go out to the real world. The hope is that you keep things like whatever today's version of rotten.com is out of their reach until they develop enough to have meaningful talks about unpleasant things in the world.
Growing up I remember friends whose parents banned south park. It didn't stop them from watching it, it just kept the parents in the dark. Once kids hit middle school, you need to strike a careful balance that let's then have their freedom while also keeping some broad guard rails in place. The content filters are great in elementary school, but need to be replaced with talks and education over time.
It's great that you are able to provide that for your kids, and unfortunate that a reasonable degree of curation requires the parent to have professional level skills in order to provide it for theirs.
Yes and no. The professional knowledge is of course helpful. However, buying the bitdefender 10 pack is designed for non technical customers. There are also other firewalls that are even easier to configure with content blocks and many Internet service providers allow our even default to content filtered DNS servers.
I think you might be really overestimating what the average level of knowledge is in this area. I only vaguely know what a firewall is, and don’t at all know what a DNS server is. When my kids are old enough to start being online unsupervised I’ll be probably relying on parental control settings on iphones.
All this to say I think the key for many of us non-techy types is communication over control. Encourage your kids to talk about what they’re doing online, let them know what the dangers are, set some boundaries so they aren’t online every minute they’re awake, and then hope for the best.
The technical controls are best for when they are young, elementary school aged, and you want them to be able to explore without ruining into something horrible. It has to be paired with communication, as once they get to middle school and go over to friends houses, you won't be there. However, I've found the controls helpful in facilitating communication, because when my kids get to a blocked page, we sit and talk about why it was blocked and whether it would be a good idea to unblock it or not. Some we whitelist, and others we agree to keep blocked. It's difficult for kids to develop good Internet practices of you can't let them run loose on the harness a bit.
As for the technical controls being difficult, I think the greatest barrier is knowing they exist. There are many non-techy focused products out there, and of you Google "parental control apps" or "home Internet content block" you will find them (and then need to self educate and soft through them). For some it isn't worth the time or money and they will have other strategies. Unfortunately, there will be some who take rather draconian approaches, such as someone I know not allowing their kids online at all and they aren't allowed to watch shows with words, not even things like Pocoyo.
all the tools in the world wont matter if distracted and uneducated parents have no will or initiative to have difficult and awkward conversations with their kids. fewer and fewer people know how to actually parent these days, and that is partly due to the world getting more complex every moment. it is very hard to keep up with understanding it for yourself, let alone being able to distill the important points into something that can be digested by a developing brain.
Yeah, at some point the kids will have access to unfiltered Internet. At some point you need to explain why you block things at home, and transition to building awareness and understanding rather than blocking content. I'm going to need to start explaining more to my oldest as they start middle school next year and start doing more things like sleepovers, etc.
i wish you the best of luck. i think the most important lessons to convey are compassion/empathy (even when not reciprocated) and critical thinking. if that foundation can be established, then the appropriate responses to the variety of issues that arise can be handled well enough. the problem lies with the eroding social norms and the increasing rarity of accepted truths.
Kids aren't easy, or at least, raising well rounded and caring adults isn't. I appreciate the advice, and likewise wish you the best!
Manuel Viejo
While the police investigate, the mothers of the affected have organized to take action and try to stop those responsible.
Gómez suffered an anxiety attack. Later, she had a conversation with her daughter: “Do you know anything about a naked photo?” The girl did not hesitate. She said yes, and showed her mother a recent Instagram conversation she had with a boy. In it, he asks her to give him “some money.” When she refused, the boy immediately sent her a naked photo of herself. All she could do was block the contact. The police believe that there is a false profile behind this account. (tap to read more)
Related - Is digital violence in an AI era yet another threat to women?
by Noor Mahtani
A hundred apps creating hyperrealistic erotic images are being flagged up by experts who are pushing for comprehensive public policies and criminalization (tap to read more)
Link to the article