What follows contains a lot of examples of verbal violence and misogyny; if you are trying to avoid being exposed to things like that, here is her conclusion : I'm conflicted on whether to post a...
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.
What follows contains a lot of examples of verbal violence and misogyny; if you are trying to avoid being exposed to things like that, here is her conclusion :
Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it. As wrong as it is, I persistently find myself considering if there are truly any boys out there who are not misogynistic to some extent, and have even questioned whether I can find love in the future because of this. I understand that boys are victims of harmful content, as well as perpetrators of online misogyny – they’re growing up learning how to do this from the adults who post misogynistic videos first. But even so, I feel such a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.
I'm conflicted on whether to post a spoiler box of terminology that appears in the article for education purposes only: they are vile and has no place in polite society, but I do feel like we as adults have the responsibility (if we are able) to know of them as signs of [edit: incivility]. Like learning alt right symbols and such.
Thoughts on how to keep girls and women safe? How to protect and educate our teens (of all gender identities) without making them live in a naive wall garden pretending it's all okay?
Discussion here of "how to keep women and girls safe" feels very othering to me, insofar as it feels like this comment was directed at people who do not belong to the class consisting of women and...
Discussion here of "how to keep women and girls safe" feels very othering to me, insofar as it feels like this comment was directed at people who do not belong to the class consisting of women and girls. After all, if you ask someone who is the victim of societal misogyny like this how to keep themselves safe from it... the answer is you really can't. It's like putting a tea bag in a cup of water and asking how to keep it dry. Radically change the world I live in, maybe, but that's hardly actionable advice.
Not everyone's experiences are as harsh as this girl's, but a lot more than you think are. By and large we are used to living in a society where misogyny is ubiquitous, or at least a constant threat. I think there are broad societal changes we can advocate for and attitudes we can strive to instill in younger generations that will make the world less awful for women, and I think we can see from history huge strides forward that prove it is possible to make changes. I try to remind myself of that to prevent my doomer-y tendencies. But at the same time, it does still feel like trying to empty a lake with a teaspoon.
I'm not a current teenager, so there's a limit to how directly I can suggest specific solutions to what she describes, too. I don't necessarily agree with her that a social media ban for under-16s would solve these problems, though. It may, optimistically, make them less visible, though I'm skeptical there too. But teenage boys aren't going to stop learning misogyny from adults and their peers because they aren't allowed to use social media without faking an age verification. If there's one thing that's pretty clear, it's that men can perpetuate and propagate misogyny very thoroughly through in-person interaction alone.
As an aside, I would recommend not using the word "degeneracy", even to describe stuff that is extremely vile like the stuff you use it for here. "Degenerate" is an explicitly eugenicist term and imo we have plenty of better words to criticize disgusting behavior like that in this article without using one that relates so inherently to fascism and race science.
EDIT TO ADD: While it addresses a different gendered issue as its focus, I think looking at this essay and the comments on it here on Tildes is a good place to look when you think about making the world better for women and girls, and most of the comments already there are thorough and thoughtful to an extent that mine here really isn't. As for any exceptions in that comment section, well... a lesson on how misogyny looks when it isn't from 15-year-olds.
This exactly. Banning Social Media will not stop the abuse. I was in High School in the late 90's-early 2000's and this shit was everywhere back then, same exact thing, just different words and...
I'm not a current teenager, so there's a limit to how directly I can suggest specific solutions to what she describes, too. I don't necessarily agree with her that a social media ban for under-16s would solve these problems, though. It may, optimistically, make them less visible, though I'm skeptical there too. But teenage boys aren't going to stop learning misogyny from adults and their peers because they aren't allowed to use social media without faking an age verification. If there's one thing that's pretty clear, it's that men can perpetuate and propagate misogyny very thoroughly through in-person interaction alone.
This exactly. Banning Social Media will not stop the abuse. I was in High School in the late 90's-early 2000's and this shit was everywhere back then, same exact thing, just different words and terms. I've a man, was a boy and I've heard it all and nothing in piece sounds different from the things I heard my friends saying back then, things I participated in as an ignorant young man.
It's like putting a tea bag in a cup of water and asking how to keep it dry. Radically change the world I live in, maybe, but that's hardly actionable advice.
The only thing we can do is to teach the women in our life to be resilient. By nature of them having a vagina, the world is going to hurl abuse and harassment at them. My wife, my sister, my sisters in law all have their own stories of it and we all worry about the nieces and nephews now in our family.
The women in my life are resilient; they've coped with the abuse they've taken and have grown to be strong women. I wish I could say, "it'll never happen again", but we know that's bullshit. I'm training my own boys to keep their hands to themselves, be respectful of everyone and I call them out when I hear them use language I find abhorrent, but it's a drop in the pond versus what else is out there.
I'll add that misogyny and sexism doesn't even just affect women. The prescriptivist idea that gender x is like this and gender y is like this negatively affects both men and women, and is...
I'll add that misogyny and sexism doesn't even just affect women. The prescriptivist idea that gender x is like this and gender y is like this negatively affects both men and women, and is propogated by both men and woman as well.
When a boy wants to act in a play but doesn't because "that's gay", it's a big tragedy, just like when a girl doesn't pursue engineering because it's "for men".
Showing men good examples of men who are secure with themselves and can do the things they want to do regardless of prescribed gender norms can go a long way.
At the end of the day the thing that's missing is empathy. Boys aren't thinking about what it's like to be a girl and have your every move judged through a lens of "slut" versus "virgin".
I was completely unaware of the word being associated with fascism and race, thank you for pointing that out. I do want to emphasize again that I wish to protect and help educate our teens of all...
I was completely unaware of the word being associated with fascism and race, thank you for pointing that out.
I do want to emphasize again that I wish to protect and help educate our teens of all gender identities. But it is also a sad fact that images / online presence of those perceived to be feminine get a lot more creepy and hate than online prescences of those with no identifiable gender. This is a a violence that is happening to everyone, yes.
to be clear, my post isn't a "this is something experienced by all gender identities" thing, it's more of a "this is how much it sucks to experience misogyny and live in a world where you can't...
to be clear, my post isn't a "this is something experienced by all gender identities" thing, it's more of a "this is how much it sucks to experience misogyny and live in a world where you can't ever really escape from it" more emotional response. I identify as non-binary now and use he/him pronouns, but I grew up as and have lived the majority of my life as a woman. But even without the complicated gender feelings involved for me, living in a world that's so full of misogyny fucking sucks and emotionally it's hard to cope with the knowledge that it will always be there, at least on any timescale that's relevant to my life.
btw I figured you probably didn't know re: degenerate, people often use it thoughtlessly on the internet (and I feel like I've seen it more often recently) and it's easy enough to pick it up from others without knowing the baggage, so I just try to push back when I can so people realize the connotations it has.
The world is full of nasty people. Trying to fix the root of mysogyny feels pretty hopeless in a world where one of the largest nations with secure women’s rights is backsliding so quickly and...
The world is full of nasty people. Trying to fix the root of mysogyny feels pretty hopeless in a world where one of the largest nations with secure women’s rights is backsliding so quickly and even liberal European nations have this problem. In my country, a majority of the population believes that it is more acceptable to have a rapist president who said “grab them by the pussy” than a woman. In two elections. That’s pretty clearly what the people want and the cause of this problem as well.
That said, the world is also full of good people. Finding and building community with likeminded good people is the key to both weather the horrors and fight back. No one needs to be experiencing a social media feed that is full of hatred and mysogyny - partly because this violates the platform rules so we need to be on them to moderate properly and reporting these videos as often as possible - but mostly because what you see is controlled by you, either through a curated feed or simply not using that platform.
Like many things in life, my answer is to get better friends and curate what you read and watch instead of consuming everything and then complaining its awful. This is something that needs to be taught at an early age - actually, it can start before they can talk. Even a 1 year old can express preference in books and toys and bodily autonomy. By 15 or 16 a child should have the tools to avoid the things they don’t want to see and trusted adults they feel safe to discuss these problems with. This goes for ALL children - there are many young perpetrators of the nonsense that are only repeating it because they don’t know how else to fit in, even though they know it’s wrong.
I do my part for what it is - at this point I rarely participate in communities that I don’t moderate or trust the moderators (part of that is that I seem to be a perpetual moderator the way some people are forever DMs). I encourage young women and queer teens to find communities that have women and queer moderators: it’s a good sign. On platforms without community moderators I use the report and block buttons frequently. Some of my friends go further and actively seek out rulebreaking content of this nature to report it, but I prefer to not expose myself to that. And if we keep backsliding we won’t be able to rely on the big platforms much longer, so community moderated sites and smaller platforms like here, traditional forums, etc, become very important.
I do not think a partial internet ban is even remotely a solution. The mysogyny is all around us, offline and online. Cutting off avenues to see different opinions and make better friends isn’t going to help.
I have a lot of disorganized thoughts about this, but it kind of touches on something that's I've noticed about the modern internet that's really disturbed me. When I was growing up in the late...
I have a lot of disorganized thoughts about this, but it kind of touches on something that's I've noticed about the modern internet that's really disturbed me.
When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was obviously some of this, but things felt a lot more progressive to me back then.
My friends and I were aware of some girls being labeled as sluts or whatever, but none of us cared at all about "body counts". That wasn't even a term. I never even thought to ask any girl how many guys she slept with.
Our moms were mostly feminists, and it was just taken as an assumption that women liked sex just like guys did, and judging them for it made no sense. It wasn't perfect, and there were still obviously guys that cared about that stuff, but to me it felt like sort of a fringe, backwards opinion.
Similarly, online, most people seemed to mostly be on the same page. There were places back then filled with violent misogyny like 4chan, and on games, people would be sexist or racist, but it feels different now.
The internet after smart phones became proliferated seemed to just get way more conservative. It was shocking to me the first time I heard the opinion that ideally, women should stay home and not get jobs being parroted by men and women alike. It made no sense to me, why would a man want a woman that he has to fully support financially?
Over time, this just became the prevailing background opinion of the internet, which was just total whiplash for me, growing up in a pretty conservative place and always thinking of the internet as fairly progressive.
It's not just online now though. On reality TV shows, on dating shows, in movies, everything just seems... conservative. Women brag about having rich boyfriends and not working. Men talk about how pure and innocent women are.
It feels like over the course of 20 years, we've socially regressed 30.
It's overall just really tanked my opinion of western "culture". Being able to shout at the void and have an algorithm figure out the most engaging shouts have distilled online content into something that's simultaneously oversexualized but also over judgemental. It's like the absolute worst aspects of the human psyche are put on display for the world to see online and rewarded.
I don't even know how you fix it. It feels way too fundemental for the normal incentive tweaking via regulation or public awareness to resolve.
Like, how do you encourage people who are being complete assholes with no empathy or drive beside their base instincts to behave?
I could be wrong but I think this ties into how the extreme right/conservatives have been (unwittingly or otherwise) much more unified and effective at weaponizing social and traditional media....
I could be wrong but I think this ties into how the extreme right/conservatives have been (unwittingly or otherwise) much more unified and effective at weaponizing social and traditional media. The opposition is fractured into a million pieces all in combat with each other on something or another (correctness, not doing enough, etc) and have shown almost no interest or capability in effectively spreading shared philosphies or bringing more people aboard.
I'm surprised to hear you say that! I feel like I've known about the concept of "body count" (we called it a person's "number" when I was in high school/university) from both my personal life and...
When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was obviously some of this, but things felt a lot more progressive to me back then.
My friends and I were aware of some girls being labeled as sluts or whatever, but none of us cared at all about "body counts". That wasn't even a term. I never even thought to ask any girl how many guys she slept with.
Our moms were mostly feminists, and it was just taken as an assumption that women liked sex just like guys did, and judging them for it made no sense. It wasn't perfect, and there were still obviously guys that cared about that stuff, but to me it felt like sort of a fringe, backwards opinion.
I'm surprised to hear you say that! I feel like I've known about the concept of "body count" (we called it a person's "number" when I was in high school/university) from both my personal life and from media, and I grew up only a little later than you (2000s/early 2010s).
The 2011 film What's Your Number? even relied on widespread familiarity with the concept for the basis of its title. (The film being based on the 2006 novel 20 Times a Lady, apparently).
In my experience, a person's "number" was something that relatively progressive, feminist men didn't care about as much as the more conservative men, but almost everyone (including some women) had an idea about how many former partners was too many.
That number might be 1 for the devoutly religious or 100 for the extremely sex positive, but it was rare to find someone who truly did not care one whit if their partner had a "number" that was many times higher than their own.
Hell, my first serious girlfriend was not at all happy that my own "number" was marginally higher than hers, and I had quite a short sexual history! (For reference, I would characterize her as centre-left politically, but fairly feminist).
One starker difference between progressive/feminist men and misogynist men, though, was that progressive/feminist men didn't use sexist slurs or shame women for their number of past partners: they just didn't pursue a woman if she exceeded his threshold for "too many".
All this to say that I don't think caring about someone's sexual history ever really went away. It's just that society's misogynists were handed a megaphone by social media algorithms that prioritize engagement, and they're using that megaphone to spread the idea that it's okay to lash out at women and girls because of insane narratives about how "fEmALes aRE eViL!"
25 years ago we absolutely had the "number" language too, body count came later, but I went to Catholic school so you were also a whore if you had sex before marriage. Just the girls though....
25 years ago we absolutely had the "number" language too, body count came later, but I went to Catholic school so you were also a whore if you had sex before marriage. Just the girls though. Though it was also enforced by other girls because that is what the patriarchy does to you.
We didn't have "haha bitch hope you didn't talk this much when you were raped*"x200 pinging your phone all day and night.
So some of it is absolutely amplification, I think some of it is being completely shielded from the physical and social consequences (which is why when shit did happen in person it was often by popular kids) and the rise of acceptable misogyny.
*There was absolutely shaming of victims (Monica Lewinsky for one) and I'm sure someone somewhere said this, but it was not in my high schooler cultural awareness.
I'm sure it was a topic of conversation, but it just didn't come up that much. Like, I've never really thought to ask anyone I was with, and I've never been asked by men or women. If I found out...
I'm sure it was a topic of conversation, but it just didn't come up that much. Like, I've never really thought to ask anyone I was with, and I've never been asked by men or women.
If I found out that some girl I was interested in slept with 200 guys or something ridiculous in highschool, I'd have concerns and so would most people, but it's just not something that really came up that much. It seems like the main thing that young people talk about now though.
Honestly, that's shocking to me! Again, I have a short romantic history, but all of my partners (all women, all fairly progressive) have asked me what my "number" was, usually pretty early in the...
Honestly, that's shocking to me!
Again, I have a short romantic history, but all of my partners (all women, all fairly progressive) have asked me what my "number" was, usually pretty early in the relationship.
I've even had female friends ask me what my number is--and press me for an answer when I refused to share it publicly ("Hundreds, easily" usually got a laugh).
I'm curious where you grew up, because where I grew up (East Texas), it never even progressed past that. Sexism and misogyny deeply pervade the culture. Women are held to an impossible standard:...
I'm curious where you grew up, because where I grew up (East Texas), it never even progressed past that. Sexism and misogyny deeply pervade the culture. Women are held to an impossible standard: be beautiful, but not slutty. Be thin, but not too thin. Don't be picky about food, but don't like it too much. The double standard around sex and virginity is very damaging. It did number on my sister, and I definitely would not raise my daughter there. I know there's nothing I can do to protect her from it except to prepare her to believe that it's wrong and believe that she deserves better.
The number of women and nonbinary folks who viscerally respond to Labour is so deeply telling. I've seen a number of cis men share how listening evoked an understanding of women's experiences too....
The number of women and nonbinary folks who viscerally respond to Labour is so deeply telling. I've seen a number of cis men share how listening evoked an understanding of women's experiences too.
I agree, there's a power to music. This song communicates some experiences that I will never know directly, but it also resonated strongly with me when I was the stay at home dad. I learned a lot...
I agree, there's a power to music. This song communicates some experiences that I will never know directly, but it also resonated strongly with me when I was the stay at home dad. I learned a lot from that experience, and I think we'd benefit in many ways as a society from more men having that experience.
She's describing the world I remember as a teenager decades ago. And doing a very articulate job of it at 15! The social media feeds are new but the behavior isn't. The internet does make it worse...
She's describing the world I remember as a teenager decades ago. And doing a very articulate job of it at 15! The social media feeds are new but the behavior isn't.
The internet does make it worse though. The way a lot of men and boys talk online is similar to how they used to talk when it was a group of just boys, but rarely in mixed company. It was mostly posturing, most of them would never actually treat a girl badly, they were too terrified of them. The internet made it more public.
The biggest problem is that most teenaged boys, and 20 something men too, are idiots. Not fundamentally idiots, just lacking in brain development and empathy and healthy coping mechanisms for their fears and insecurities.
Note that I'm not saying that teenaged girls aren't idiots too, or that generalizing boys is fair or accurate. But it does make it easier to talk about without an encyclopedia of disclaimers.
What I'm getting at is that the combination of popular cultural ideas about how men should identify and behave, along with the way many men are socialized, and the inherent uncertainty and uncomfortability of growing up and figuring out who you are, compounded by a high level of testosterone... it's not a great combination for creating well adjusted behavior.
It seems to me that cultural norms for men have changed a lot, for the better, but the process is slow. A lot of outdated ideas are still holding on.
I think we can help that process along by having some empathy for boys and young men. I don't mean that we should condone their misogyny. They need to understand that it's not ok. But the thing is, many of them don't have any context for understanding why it isn't ok. It's really really easy to say stuff online, you don't have to mean it, sometimes saying things you don't mean is the point, and teenage boys have poor impulse control and a strong urge to test limits. Teenaged girls too. Sometimes it's being offensive for the sake of being offensive.
When I read about this girl's experience, I want to make it better for her. She has no context yet to understand the complexities of sexuality and it's deeply wrong that the world is projecting sexuality onto her. When I was 15, though, I didn't have the bandwidth or the context to understand her experience. Almost no boy I knew when I was 15 did. Very few 15 year old boys I've known since have. Ideally culture, or our parents, would have helped us understand better, but it didn't.
One of the side effects of labeling your fears and insecurities as weak and trying to cover them with strength, which many cultural groups expect of men, is that you're effectively having less compassion and empathy for yourself and so you end up with less empathy for others. Self defense mechanisms insulate you from both yourself and the world, that's their purpose.
Some men are objectively broken, some boys too, but the bulk are just trying to figure shit out in an imperfect chemical reality and with imperfect information. Of the latter, most will respond better, and learn more, from a compassionate approach.
I'm not saying anyone in this thread is suggesting a different approach, I just think it's a useful reminder. A simplified version is useful for teenagers to understand. Some day we might live in a world where a lot of teenagers of all genders aren't guaranteed to be assholes some of the time, but we're not there yet. Right now we can expect it. It happens because they're fighting their own demons, not because of anything about the targets of the assholery.
About social media bans: I'm all for it. Generally I'm against censorship, but I'm comfortable with some amount where developing brains are concerned, people will literally say anything on the internet and the volume is just way too much. If we can reduce social media use in teens it can only be good for society.
Unfortunately as an elder millennial I can confirm that there are people in my age bracket who may not have grown beyond this mindset. Honestly, I think the machine, the algorithmic brainwashing,...
teenaged boys, and 20 something men
Unfortunately as an elder millennial I can confirm that there are people in my age bracket who may not have grown beyond this mindset.
About social media bans
Honestly, I think the machine, the algorithmic brainwashing, is 9/10 of the problem rather than the information itself. It's like a bad context factory. So we don't even have to think of it as censorship (or at least I don't), since no specific data is being suppressed. More like dismantling a harmful weapon.
That's a good way to frame it. We can all see the harmful effects, and we long ago established that developing humans shouldn't be given unfettered access to dangerous things.
More like dismantling a harmful weapon
That's a good way to frame it. We can all see the harmful effects, and we long ago established that developing humans shouldn't be given unfettered access to dangerous things.
I'm not altogether sure that fully developed humans should be exposed to algorithmic media at the level we currently are. I feel like (if we make it as a society) in a century or two we're going...
I'm not altogether sure that fully developed humans should be exposed to algorithmic media at the level we currently are. I feel like (if we make it as a society) in a century or two we're going to look at this time in history the way that we look back at the early 20th century and smoking/tobacco companies.
So want to start out with stating that I am a male, but when I was in highschool a bit over a decade ago, a lot of the stuff discussed were around. I think it is worth mentioning that nothing...
So want to start out with stating that I am a male, but when I was in highschool a bit over a decade ago, a lot of the stuff discussed were around. I think it is worth mentioning that nothing stated in this article is new, maybe it is just more prevalent than when I was a teenager? I do think that there are more troubling and popular with male teen influencers than when I was a teen, and as a society we should be trying to address that. But also, some of these experiences that the writer has experienced are common for women to have experienced since social media has become popular (and there were probably other similar things experienced pre social media). But it seems to be getting worse, not better, and that is concerning.
Yeah I'm in my early 30s now and this was all present back when I was in high school, but it does seem like modern social media has turned the intensity and frequency of exposure up to 11. It's a...
Yeah I'm in my early 30s now and this was all present back when I was in high school, but it does seem like modern social media has turned the intensity and frequency of exposure up to 11. It's a serious problem, I don't know that banning social media outright for those under 16 will do anything to stop it, but I'm not going to pretend like I have a better solution. I feel like the issues are on a systemic level that requires a lot more than pulling one lever. Then again, maybe starting with the 1 lever is better than nothing? I just don't want people to pretend "we did it! We solved the issue!" by putting up the under 16 ban and then calling it a day.
I do feel like that while this is not new, it has absolutely been dialed up to 11. When I was a teenager online, things weren't as interconnected, and there wasn't billion dollar algorithms...
I do feel like that while this is not new, it has absolutely been dialed up to 11.
When I was a teenager online, things weren't as interconnected, and there wasn't billion dollar algorithms monetizing hate as engagement. I could post a picture of myself being a girl, and maybe a dozen people might see it. Maybe let's say even a million people see it. But they wouldn't have the ability to publicly and directly post insults back at me. At worst, it could go viral, like Ermahghed girl, and in separate, small corners of the Internet people might talk about it or make fun of it or make it a meme whatever. But they would have extremely limited ways to find me, hurl insults at me, or send me PMs to suggest I hurt myself.
Now we have billionaires directing entire tech teams to benefit from this situation to not just spread, but to promote, and to redirect it back to the user for "more reaction".
The interconnectedness is an anonymiser and multiplier: in ye olden days, if I posted something mean on my local fish forum or high school blog, there are consequences to outsting myself as a jerk, and there was a good likelihood that whoever first posted that image actually knew this young person and would be rightfully offended. Now we have images being spread far and wide to audiences that did not ask for it, and have no connection to the person as a human being, to a bigger audience that cheers for crude and cruel comments.
I agree that a ban isn't going to solve anything, but I think having 1 lever is better than none. If we say, hey we have evidence that [company] is monetizing self harm and pushing for rage, it's okay to say, this isn't something that is appropriate for young people.
Yes, determined kids can and will get around it, but there is also value in having kids being able to say, yea my parents are totally crazy and they won't let me be on [platform] or else there'd be consequences. Some of us had parents who encouraged us to use them as an excuse to get out of socially dicey situations, and maybe it's good to have one. And if legally kids aren't allowed on these platforms anymore, it also opens up the landscape for more curated, better protected products suitable for teens to flourish and outcompete the rage machines.
I resonate with this thought a lot. I think it is worth figuring out what is happening with adolescent culture that is making figures like Andrew Tate more popular, and then addressing those....
I feel like the issues are on a systemic level that requires a lot more than pulling one lever.
I resonate with this thought a lot. I think it is worth figuring out what is happening with adolescent culture that is making figures like Andrew Tate more popular, and then addressing those. Although, I feel like some of the draw is that when privilege is all you know, equality feels like oppression. So to some extent, removing the privilege that white males have enjoyed to promote equality, for some they will perceive it as persecution (and sometimes the pendulum has swung too far the other way, to the point of persecution). So I think, in general there needs to be work done so that following the ethical route of society seems like it will have optimistic outcomes, so that they don't turn towards figures like Tate who are the only ones who are showing a pathway to being rich.
Then again, maybe starting with the 1 lever is better than nothing? I just don't want people to pretend "we did it! We solved the issue!" by putting up the under 16 ban and then calling it a day.
Yeah, don't let the concept of the perfect prevent the work of the good.
I can only speculate since I haven't been a teenager for nearly two decades at this point, but my main theory regarding the popularity of Tate & co among teens is that he offers strong,...
I can only speculate since I haven't been a teenager for nearly two decades at this point, but my main theory regarding the popularity of Tate & co among teens is that he offers strong, well-defined (but unfortunately absoutely awful) identity and direction.
Being a teenager (and to a lesser extent, a young adult) in general is all about figuring out who you are and where you want to go, and right now what it is exactly to be a man is more up in the air than it's probably ever been in recorded history. It's no wonder then that teenage boys and young men are seeking strong highly visible role models, of which there are currently few, and so terrible people like Tate end up becoming like lighthouses on the dark stormy seas of these boys/mens' lives.
In conclusion, I think we need "lighthouses" out there for boys/men that set forth positive examples and outshine the Tates of the world.
I used to be a Pirate, in the political sense. That is, I used to think that freedom of speech and online anonymity are one of the holiest things humankind has invented and we should suffer...
I used to be a Pirate, in the political sense. That is, I used to think that freedom of speech and online anonymity are one of the holiest things humankind has invented and we should suffer absolutely no exceptions to it.
Now I think we should all be forced to login with an identifiable account and things like what this girl has faced should be felonies and the catch rate for those criminals should be 100%. Funny how perspectives change.
Some people say that this will just be used by authoritarian governments to subjugate people. I'm thinking that this is focusing on the wrong problem. The problem is not that we gave the authoritarians tools that they misuse, the problem is that we have authoritarian government. Perhaps it's naive to think that we might have something that is not that, but I think it's possibly more naive to think that an authoritarian government needs these things to subjugate people. If they don't like you, they can just come to your house and shoot you in the face -- why would they need to dig through your communication to do that?
And as a cherry on top, authoritarian goverments have arisen in many places by using propaganda techniques enabled by anonymity. Shouldn't we put a stop to that immediately?
The point of anonymity is that if an authoritarian government sees your post, they can't shoot you in the face, because they don't know it's yours. Just because authoritarian governments can form...
The point of anonymity is that if an authoritarian government sees your post, they can't shoot you in the face, because they don't know it's yours.
Just because authoritarian governments can form in its presence, doesn't mean that in its absence, they can't form easier and in a worse form. Every government in history has been massively corrupt at some point: I can't imagine a government with complete control over information not eventually becoming dystopian. Maybe with the help of AI and/or a smarter division of power, we can form a government responsible enough to wield that power, but we must figure out what and how to get there.
ETA: Another issue is that it's practically impossible to criminalize harassment, because it can be subtle and only apparent to the target. One reason we have new slurs like th*t and not just w*hore is because the former get past filters set up to block the latter. Public forums have trouble simply detecting harassment; to convict someone, you can't just suspect that they're guilty, you must prove it "beyond reasonable doubt".
In the meantime, I think there should be private spaces, and getting into those without access (which may require ID), or bypassing their automated filters, should be illegal. Then, children should only be given access to these spaces. That would prevent the worst forms of abuse, and I think no bots and effective bans would significantly reduce harassment and general toxicity. But adults should be allowed to access the larger anonymous internet.
That's a pretty wild swing. I'm not sure where I belong on the spectrum of free speech and an anonymous web. But I do know that a lot of money is behind "anonymous" forces, and I think that if we...
That's a pretty wild swing.
I'm not sure where I belong on the spectrum of free speech and an anonymous web. But I do know that a lot of money is behind "anonymous" forces, and I think that if we first target the big criminals, the web will be cleaned up enough we can then have more meaningful conversations about the idiot teens and anonymous mean cowards.
Tildes is not a place with absolute free speech, and our accounts are not totally anonymous in that a single account or even an entire branch can be nuked at will with no public explanations, and Tildes certainly does not allow big money corporate interference. And I think that it is not a coincidence we're a much better corner of the internet than some "freer" others.
Removing anonymity is a double edged sword. Sure it would probably reduce the hate people give out online. But it also reduces people’s abilities to discuss personal/private information. It would...
Removing anonymity is a double edged sword. Sure it would probably reduce the hate people give out online. But it also reduces people’s abilities to discuss personal/private information. It would also make stalking much easier and basically impossible for someone to hide from a stalker.
Privacy can be harmful, but it can also be beneficial and I think a blanket ban would be irresponsible
To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person was a book on this topic by a journalist who attracted a lot of online hatred. It seemed to be well researched to me, with my limited experience, but...
To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person was a book on this topic by a journalist who attracted a lot of online hatred. It seemed to be well researched to me, with my limited experience, but I read it a while ago, so I can't remember much.
It addressed the physical health issues caused by online bullying in addition to the mental issues. To sum up what I understood it as; back in ye olden days, the only way someone would be able to threaten you, is if they were standing directly in front if you, or got their friend to say it on their behalf. Humans still see words as an immediate danger, and it triggers the flight-or-fight reflex. Having high adrenaline levels for an extended amount of time will cause health problems, but the messages just don't end.
What follows contains a lot of examples of verbal violence and misogyny; if you are trying to avoid being exposed to things like that, here is her conclusion :
I'm conflicted on whether to post a spoiler box of terminology that appears in the article for education purposes only: they are vile and has no place in polite society, but I do feel like we as adults have the responsibility (if we are able) to know of them as signs of [edit: incivility]. Like learning alt right symbols and such.
Thoughts on how to keep girls and women safe? How to protect and educate our teens (of all gender identities) without making them live in a naive wall garden pretending it's all okay?
Discussion here of "how to keep women and girls safe" feels very othering to me, insofar as it feels like this comment was directed at people who do not belong to the class consisting of women and girls. After all, if you ask someone who is the victim of societal misogyny like this how to keep themselves safe from it... the answer is you really can't. It's like putting a tea bag in a cup of water and asking how to keep it dry. Radically change the world I live in, maybe, but that's hardly actionable advice.
Not everyone's experiences are as harsh as this girl's, but a lot more than you think are. By and large we are used to living in a society where misogyny is ubiquitous, or at least a constant threat. I think there are broad societal changes we can advocate for and attitudes we can strive to instill in younger generations that will make the world less awful for women, and I think we can see from history huge strides forward that prove it is possible to make changes. I try to remind myself of that to prevent my doomer-y tendencies. But at the same time, it does still feel like trying to empty a lake with a teaspoon.
I'm not a current teenager, so there's a limit to how directly I can suggest specific solutions to what she describes, too. I don't necessarily agree with her that a social media ban for under-16s would solve these problems, though. It may, optimistically, make them less visible, though I'm skeptical there too. But teenage boys aren't going to stop learning misogyny from adults and their peers because they aren't allowed to use social media without faking an age verification. If there's one thing that's pretty clear, it's that men can perpetuate and propagate misogyny very thoroughly through in-person interaction alone.
As an aside, I would recommend not using the word "degeneracy", even to describe stuff that is extremely vile like the stuff you use it for here. "Degenerate" is an explicitly eugenicist term and imo we have plenty of better words to criticize disgusting behavior like that in this article without using one that relates so inherently to fascism and race science.
EDIT TO ADD: While it addresses a different gendered issue as its focus, I think looking at this essay and the comments on it here on Tildes is a good place to look when you think about making the world better for women and girls, and most of the comments already there are thorough and thoughtful to an extent that mine here really isn't. As for any exceptions in that comment section, well... a lesson on how misogyny looks when it isn't from 15-year-olds.
This exactly. Banning Social Media will not stop the abuse. I was in High School in the late 90's-early 2000's and this shit was everywhere back then, same exact thing, just different words and terms. I've a man, was a boy and I've heard it all and nothing in piece sounds different from the things I heard my friends saying back then, things I participated in as an ignorant young man.
The only thing we can do is to teach the women in our life to be resilient. By nature of them having a vagina, the world is going to hurl abuse and harassment at them. My wife, my sister, my sisters in law all have their own stories of it and we all worry about the nieces and nephews now in our family.
The women in my life are resilient; they've coped with the abuse they've taken and have grown to be strong women. I wish I could say, "it'll never happen again", but we know that's bullshit. I'm training my own boys to keep their hands to themselves, be respectful of everyone and I call them out when I hear them use language I find abhorrent, but it's a drop in the pond versus what else is out there.
I'll add that misogyny and sexism doesn't even just affect women. The prescriptivist idea that gender x is like this and gender y is like this negatively affects both men and women, and is propogated by both men and woman as well.
When a boy wants to act in a play but doesn't because "that's gay", it's a big tragedy, just like when a girl doesn't pursue engineering because it's "for men".
Showing men good examples of men who are secure with themselves and can do the things they want to do regardless of prescribed gender norms can go a long way.
At the end of the day the thing that's missing is empathy. Boys aren't thinking about what it's like to be a girl and have your every move judged through a lens of "slut" versus "virgin".
Bad news, not having a vagina doesn't help women avoid misogyny. It's being part of the "woman" category that seems to do it.
Or even just being perceived as being part of the woman category.
I was completely unaware of the word being associated with fascism and race, thank you for pointing that out.
I do want to emphasize again that I wish to protect and help educate our teens of all gender identities. But it is also a sad fact that images / online presence of those perceived to be feminine get a lot more creepy and hate than online prescences of those with no identifiable gender. This is a a violence that is happening to everyone, yes.
to be clear, my post isn't a "this is something experienced by all gender identities" thing, it's more of a "this is how much it sucks to experience misogyny and live in a world where you can't ever really escape from it" more emotional response. I identify as non-binary now and use he/him pronouns, but I grew up as and have lived the majority of my life as a woman. But even without the complicated gender feelings involved for me, living in a world that's so full of misogyny fucking sucks and emotionally it's hard to cope with the knowledge that it will always be there, at least on any timescale that's relevant to my life.
btw I figured you probably didn't know re: degenerate, people often use it thoughtlessly on the internet (and I feel like I've seen it more often recently) and it's easy enough to pick it up from others without knowing the baggage, so I just try to push back when I can so people realize the connotations it has.
The world is full of nasty people. Trying to fix the root of mysogyny feels pretty hopeless in a world where one of the largest nations with secure women’s rights is backsliding so quickly and even liberal European nations have this problem. In my country, a majority of the population believes that it is more acceptable to have a rapist president who said “grab them by the pussy” than a woman. In two elections. That’s pretty clearly what the people want and the cause of this problem as well.
That said, the world is also full of good people. Finding and building community with likeminded good people is the key to both weather the horrors and fight back. No one needs to be experiencing a social media feed that is full of hatred and mysogyny - partly because this violates the platform rules so we need to be on them to moderate properly and reporting these videos as often as possible - but mostly because what you see is controlled by you, either through a curated feed or simply not using that platform.
Like many things in life, my answer is to get better friends and curate what you read and watch instead of consuming everything and then complaining its awful. This is something that needs to be taught at an early age - actually, it can start before they can talk. Even a 1 year old can express preference in books and toys and bodily autonomy. By 15 or 16 a child should have the tools to avoid the things they don’t want to see and trusted adults they feel safe to discuss these problems with. This goes for ALL children - there are many young perpetrators of the nonsense that are only repeating it because they don’t know how else to fit in, even though they know it’s wrong.
I do my part for what it is - at this point I rarely participate in communities that I don’t moderate or trust the moderators (part of that is that I seem to be a perpetual moderator the way some people are forever DMs). I encourage young women and queer teens to find communities that have women and queer moderators: it’s a good sign. On platforms without community moderators I use the report and block buttons frequently. Some of my friends go further and actively seek out rulebreaking content of this nature to report it, but I prefer to not expose myself to that. And if we keep backsliding we won’t be able to rely on the big platforms much longer, so community moderated sites and smaller platforms like here, traditional forums, etc, become very important.
I do not think a partial internet ban is even remotely a solution. The mysogyny is all around us, offline and online. Cutting off avenues to see different opinions and make better friends isn’t going to help.
I have a lot of disorganized thoughts about this, but it kind of touches on something that's I've noticed about the modern internet that's really disturbed me.
When I was growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was obviously some of this, but things felt a lot more progressive to me back then.
My friends and I were aware of some girls being labeled as sluts or whatever, but none of us cared at all about "body counts". That wasn't even a term. I never even thought to ask any girl how many guys she slept with.
Our moms were mostly feminists, and it was just taken as an assumption that women liked sex just like guys did, and judging them for it made no sense. It wasn't perfect, and there were still obviously guys that cared about that stuff, but to me it felt like sort of a fringe, backwards opinion.
Similarly, online, most people seemed to mostly be on the same page. There were places back then filled with violent misogyny like 4chan, and on games, people would be sexist or racist, but it feels different now.
The internet after smart phones became proliferated seemed to just get way more conservative. It was shocking to me the first time I heard the opinion that ideally, women should stay home and not get jobs being parroted by men and women alike. It made no sense to me, why would a man want a woman that he has to fully support financially?
Over time, this just became the prevailing background opinion of the internet, which was just total whiplash for me, growing up in a pretty conservative place and always thinking of the internet as fairly progressive.
It's not just online now though. On reality TV shows, on dating shows, in movies, everything just seems... conservative. Women brag about having rich boyfriends and not working. Men talk about how pure and innocent women are.
It feels like over the course of 20 years, we've socially regressed 30.
It's overall just really tanked my opinion of western "culture". Being able to shout at the void and have an algorithm figure out the most engaging shouts have distilled online content into something that's simultaneously oversexualized but also over judgemental. It's like the absolute worst aspects of the human psyche are put on display for the world to see online and rewarded.
I don't even know how you fix it. It feels way too fundemental for the normal incentive tweaking via regulation or public awareness to resolve.
Like, how do you encourage people who are being complete assholes with no empathy or drive beside their base instincts to behave?
I could be wrong but I think this ties into how the extreme right/conservatives have been (unwittingly or otherwise) much more unified and effective at weaponizing social and traditional media. The opposition is fractured into a million pieces all in combat with each other on something or another (correctness, not doing enough, etc) and have shown almost no interest or capability in effectively spreading shared philosphies or bringing more people aboard.
I'm surprised to hear you say that! I feel like I've known about the concept of "body count" (we called it a person's "number" when I was in high school/university) from both my personal life and from media, and I grew up only a little later than you (2000s/early 2010s).
The 2011 film What's Your Number? even relied on widespread familiarity with the concept for the basis of its title. (The film being based on the 2006 novel 20 Times a Lady, apparently).
In my experience, a person's "number" was something that relatively progressive, feminist men didn't care about as much as the more conservative men, but almost everyone (including some women) had an idea about how many former partners was too many.
That number might be 1 for the devoutly religious or 100 for the extremely sex positive, but it was rare to find someone who truly did not care one whit if their partner had a "number" that was many times higher than their own.
Hell, my first serious girlfriend was not at all happy that my own "number" was marginally higher than hers, and I had quite a short sexual history! (For reference, I would characterize her as centre-left politically, but fairly feminist).
One starker difference between progressive/feminist men and misogynist men, though, was that progressive/feminist men didn't use sexist slurs or shame women for their number of past partners: they just didn't pursue a woman if she exceeded his threshold for "too many".
All this to say that I don't think caring about someone's sexual history ever really went away. It's just that society's misogynists were handed a megaphone by social media algorithms that prioritize engagement, and they're using that megaphone to spread the idea that it's okay to lash out at women and girls because of insane narratives about how "fEmALes aRE eViL!"
Edit: removed bolding from quoted text.
25 years ago we absolutely had the "number" language too, body count came later, but I went to Catholic school so you were also a whore if you had sex before marriage. Just the girls though. Though it was also enforced by other girls because that is what the patriarchy does to you.
We didn't have "haha bitch hope you didn't talk this much when you were raped*"x200 pinging your phone all day and night.
So some of it is absolutely amplification, I think some of it is being completely shielded from the physical and social consequences (which is why when shit did happen in person it was often by popular kids) and the rise of acceptable misogyny.
*There was absolutely shaming of victims (Monica Lewinsky for one) and I'm sure someone somewhere said this, but it was not in my high schooler cultural awareness.
I'm sure it was a topic of conversation, but it just didn't come up that much. Like, I've never really thought to ask anyone I was with, and I've never been asked by men or women.
If I found out that some girl I was interested in slept with 200 guys or something ridiculous in highschool, I'd have concerns and so would most people, but it's just not something that really came up that much. It seems like the main thing that young people talk about now though.
Honestly, that's shocking to me!
Again, I have a short romantic history, but all of my partners (all women, all fairly progressive) have asked me what my "number" was, usually pretty early in the relationship.
I've even had female friends ask me what my number is--and press me for an answer when I refused to share it publicly ("Hundreds, easily" usually got a laugh).
I'm curious where you grew up, because where I grew up (East Texas), it never even progressed past that. Sexism and misogyny deeply pervade the culture. Women are held to an impossible standard: be beautiful, but not slutty. Be thin, but not too thin. Don't be picky about food, but don't like it too much. The double standard around sex and virginity is very damaging. It did number on my sister, and I definitely would not raise my daughter there. I know there's nothing I can do to protect her from it except to prepare her to believe that it's wrong and believe that she deserves better.
Recommended listening:
The number of women and nonbinary folks who viscerally respond to Labour is so deeply telling. I've seen a number of cis men share how listening evoked an understanding of women's experiences too.
Music is an amazing thing.
I agree, there's a power to music. This song communicates some experiences that I will never know directly, but it also resonated strongly with me when I was the stay at home dad. I learned a lot from that experience, and I think we'd benefit in many ways as a society from more men having that experience.
She's describing the world I remember as a teenager decades ago. And doing a very articulate job of it at 15! The social media feeds are new but the behavior isn't.
The internet does make it worse though. The way a lot of men and boys talk online is similar to how they used to talk when it was a group of just boys, but rarely in mixed company. It was mostly posturing, most of them would never actually treat a girl badly, they were too terrified of them. The internet made it more public.
The biggest problem is that most teenaged boys, and 20 something men too, are idiots. Not fundamentally idiots, just lacking in brain development and empathy and healthy coping mechanisms for their fears and insecurities.
Note that I'm not saying that teenaged girls aren't idiots too, or that generalizing boys is fair or accurate. But it does make it easier to talk about without an encyclopedia of disclaimers.
What I'm getting at is that the combination of popular cultural ideas about how men should identify and behave, along with the way many men are socialized, and the inherent uncertainty and uncomfortability of growing up and figuring out who you are, compounded by a high level of testosterone... it's not a great combination for creating well adjusted behavior.
It seems to me that cultural norms for men have changed a lot, for the better, but the process is slow. A lot of outdated ideas are still holding on.
I think we can help that process along by having some empathy for boys and young men. I don't mean that we should condone their misogyny. They need to understand that it's not ok. But the thing is, many of them don't have any context for understanding why it isn't ok. It's really really easy to say stuff online, you don't have to mean it, sometimes saying things you don't mean is the point, and teenage boys have poor impulse control and a strong urge to test limits. Teenaged girls too. Sometimes it's being offensive for the sake of being offensive.
When I read about this girl's experience, I want to make it better for her. She has no context yet to understand the complexities of sexuality and it's deeply wrong that the world is projecting sexuality onto her. When I was 15, though, I didn't have the bandwidth or the context to understand her experience. Almost no boy I knew when I was 15 did. Very few 15 year old boys I've known since have. Ideally culture, or our parents, would have helped us understand better, but it didn't.
One of the side effects of labeling your fears and insecurities as weak and trying to cover them with strength, which many cultural groups expect of men, is that you're effectively having less compassion and empathy for yourself and so you end up with less empathy for others. Self defense mechanisms insulate you from both yourself and the world, that's their purpose.
Some men are objectively broken, some boys too, but the bulk are just trying to figure shit out in an imperfect chemical reality and with imperfect information. Of the latter, most will respond better, and learn more, from a compassionate approach.
I'm not saying anyone in this thread is suggesting a different approach, I just think it's a useful reminder. A simplified version is useful for teenagers to understand. Some day we might live in a world where a lot of teenagers of all genders aren't guaranteed to be assholes some of the time, but we're not there yet. Right now we can expect it. It happens because they're fighting their own demons, not because of anything about the targets of the assholery.
About social media bans: I'm all for it. Generally I'm against censorship, but I'm comfortable with some amount where developing brains are concerned, people will literally say anything on the internet and the volume is just way too much. If we can reduce social media use in teens it can only be good for society.
Unfortunately as an elder millennial I can confirm that there are people in my age bracket who may not have grown beyond this mindset.
Honestly, I think the machine, the algorithmic brainwashing, is 9/10 of the problem rather than the information itself. It's like a bad context factory. So we don't even have to think of it as censorship (or at least I don't), since no specific data is being suppressed. More like dismantling a harmful weapon.
That's a good way to frame it. We can all see the harmful effects, and we long ago established that developing humans shouldn't be given unfettered access to dangerous things.
I'm not altogether sure that fully developed humans should be exposed to algorithmic media at the level we currently are. I feel like (if we make it as a society) in a century or two we're going to look at this time in history the way that we look back at the early 20th century and smoking/tobacco companies.
So want to start out with stating that I am a male, but when I was in highschool a bit over a decade ago, a lot of the stuff discussed were around. I think it is worth mentioning that nothing stated in this article is new, maybe it is just more prevalent than when I was a teenager? I do think that there are more troubling and popular with male teen influencers than when I was a teen, and as a society we should be trying to address that. But also, some of these experiences that the writer has experienced are common for women to have experienced since social media has become popular (and there were probably other similar things experienced pre social media). But it seems to be getting worse, not better, and that is concerning.
Yeah I'm in my early 30s now and this was all present back when I was in high school, but it does seem like modern social media has turned the intensity and frequency of exposure up to 11. It's a serious problem, I don't know that banning social media outright for those under 16 will do anything to stop it, but I'm not going to pretend like I have a better solution. I feel like the issues are on a systemic level that requires a lot more than pulling one lever. Then again, maybe starting with the 1 lever is better than nothing? I just don't want people to pretend "we did it! We solved the issue!" by putting up the under 16 ban and then calling it a day.
I do feel like that while this is not new, it has absolutely been dialed up to 11.
When I was a teenager online, things weren't as interconnected, and there wasn't billion dollar algorithms monetizing hate as engagement. I could post a picture of myself being a girl, and maybe a dozen people might see it. Maybe let's say even a million people see it. But they wouldn't have the ability to publicly and directly post insults back at me. At worst, it could go viral, like Ermahghed girl, and in separate, small corners of the Internet people might talk about it or make fun of it or make it a meme whatever. But they would have extremely limited ways to find me, hurl insults at me, or send me PMs to suggest I hurt myself.
Now we have billionaires directing entire tech teams to benefit from this situation to not just spread, but to promote, and to redirect it back to the user for "more reaction".
The interconnectedness is an anonymiser and multiplier: in ye olden days, if I posted something mean on my local fish forum or high school blog, there are consequences to outsting myself as a jerk, and there was a good likelihood that whoever first posted that image actually knew this young person and would be rightfully offended. Now we have images being spread far and wide to audiences that did not ask for it, and have no connection to the person as a human being, to a bigger audience that cheers for crude and cruel comments.
I agree that a ban isn't going to solve anything, but I think having 1 lever is better than none. If we say, hey we have evidence that [company] is monetizing self harm and pushing for rage, it's okay to say, this isn't something that is appropriate for young people.
Yes, determined kids can and will get around it, but there is also value in having kids being able to say, yea my parents are totally crazy and they won't let me be on [platform] or else there'd be consequences. Some of us had parents who encouraged us to use them as an excuse to get out of socially dicey situations, and maybe it's good to have one. And if legally kids aren't allowed on these platforms anymore, it also opens up the landscape for more curated, better protected products suitable for teens to flourish and outcompete the rage machines.
I resonate with this thought a lot. I think it is worth figuring out what is happening with adolescent culture that is making figures like Andrew Tate more popular, and then addressing those. Although, I feel like some of the draw is that when privilege is all you know, equality feels like oppression. So to some extent, removing the privilege that white males have enjoyed to promote equality, for some they will perceive it as persecution (and sometimes the pendulum has swung too far the other way, to the point of persecution). So I think, in general there needs to be work done so that following the ethical route of society seems like it will have optimistic outcomes, so that they don't turn towards figures like Tate who are the only ones who are showing a pathway to being rich.
Yeah, don't let the concept of the perfect prevent the work of the good.
I can only speculate since I haven't been a teenager for nearly two decades at this point, but my main theory regarding the popularity of Tate & co among teens is that he offers strong, well-defined (but unfortunately absoutely awful) identity and direction.
Being a teenager (and to a lesser extent, a young adult) in general is all about figuring out who you are and where you want to go, and right now what it is exactly to be a man is more up in the air than it's probably ever been in recorded history. It's no wonder then that teenage boys and young men are seeking strong highly visible role models, of which there are currently few, and so terrible people like Tate end up becoming like lighthouses on the dark stormy seas of these boys/mens' lives.
In conclusion, I think we need "lighthouses" out there for boys/men that set forth positive examples and outshine the Tates of the world.
I used to be a Pirate, in the political sense. That is, I used to think that freedom of speech and online anonymity are one of the holiest things humankind has invented and we should suffer absolutely no exceptions to it.
Now I think we should all be forced to login with an identifiable account and things like what this girl has faced should be felonies and the catch rate for those criminals should be 100%. Funny how perspectives change.
Some people say that this will just be used by authoritarian governments to subjugate people. I'm thinking that this is focusing on the wrong problem. The problem is not that we gave the authoritarians tools that they misuse, the problem is that we have authoritarian government. Perhaps it's naive to think that we might have something that is not that, but I think it's possibly more naive to think that an authoritarian government needs these things to subjugate people. If they don't like you, they can just come to your house and shoot you in the face -- why would they need to dig through your communication to do that?
And as a cherry on top, authoritarian goverments have arisen in many places by using propaganda techniques enabled by anonymity. Shouldn't we put a stop to that immediately?
The point of anonymity is that if an authoritarian government sees your post, they can't shoot you in the face, because they don't know it's yours.
Just because authoritarian governments can form in its presence, doesn't mean that in its absence, they can't form easier and in a worse form. Every government in history has been massively corrupt at some point: I can't imagine a government with complete control over information not eventually becoming dystopian. Maybe with the help of AI and/or a smarter division of power, we can form a government responsible enough to wield that power, but we must figure out what and how to get there.
ETA: Another issue is that it's practically impossible to criminalize harassment, because it can be subtle and only apparent to the target. One reason we have new slurs like th*t and not just w*hore is because the former get past filters set up to block the latter. Public forums have trouble simply detecting harassment; to convict someone, you can't just suspect that they're guilty, you must prove it "beyond reasonable doubt".
In the meantime, I think there should be private spaces, and getting into those without access (which may require ID), or bypassing their automated filters, should be illegal. Then, children should only be given access to these spaces. That would prevent the worst forms of abuse, and I think no bots and effective bans would significantly reduce harassment and general toxicity. But adults should be allowed to access the larger anonymous internet.
That's a pretty wild swing.
I'm not sure where I belong on the spectrum of free speech and an anonymous web. But I do know that a lot of money is behind "anonymous" forces, and I think that if we first target the big criminals, the web will be cleaned up enough we can then have more meaningful conversations about the idiot teens and anonymous mean cowards.
Tildes is not a place with absolute free speech, and our accounts are not totally anonymous in that a single account or even an entire branch can be nuked at will with no public explanations, and Tildes certainly does not allow big money corporate interference. And I think that it is not a coincidence we're a much better corner of the internet than some "freer" others.
Removing anonymity is a double edged sword. Sure it would probably reduce the hate people give out online. But it also reduces people’s abilities to discuss personal/private information. It would also make stalking much easier and basically impossible for someone to hide from a stalker.
Privacy can be harmful, but it can also be beneficial and I think a blanket ban would be irresponsible
To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person was a book on this topic by a journalist who attracted a lot of online hatred. It seemed to be well researched to me, with my limited experience, but I read it a while ago, so I can't remember much.
It addressed the physical health issues caused by online bullying in addition to the mental issues. To sum up what I understood it as; back in ye olden days, the only way someone would be able to threaten you, is if they were standing directly in front if you, or got their friend to say it on their behalf. Humans still see words as an immediate danger, and it triggers the flight-or-fight reflex. Having high adrenaline levels for an extended amount of time will cause health problems, but the messages just don't end.