If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.
Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.
Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that bitch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.
I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.
This is the most persuasive argument for restricting social media to adult use only that I’ve ever heard. Can’t even imagine how damaging this kind of shit is do a developing mind.
Edit: some places have restricted it to age 16, great- but honestly 18+ would be ideal
Beginning to wonder if these attempts to push for age restriction are a concerted effort by organizations like Palantir using children to get people buy into it.
Hard to not make the link after subpoenas were issued to those critical of the US administration on reddit.
Would make it much easier to make people fear speaking out against their government on social media if IDs were required, and the government they are under is actively hostile.
That seems to be the end goal with think of the children being an easy entry point.
Okay, so tell that to the parents. It is their responsibility.
You can’t solve this problem by restricting access for teenagers. They find a way to circumvent the restrictions as they always found a way to do the things they want, as harmful as they might be. Also toxic behaviour on social media is not a teenager issue but a men issue and should be treated as such.