All the talk of identity verification got me thinking about what I’ll actually worry about my kids accessing. Perhaps I’m odd, but sex is normal and porn is just exaggerated sex so I feel like I can make it clear it’s as realistic as Lord of the Rings.
What worries me is the brainrot from getting stuck in a media bubble. We are so incredibly vulnerable to being swayed by both propaganda and fringe thinking these days and it’s only easier to create echo chambers with all the AI content flooding the web now.
What do you think is the most dangerous part of the net for those ignorant of the threats?
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Hands down social media. They all basically engage in rage baiting in their operations. The intent isn’t to connect but be divisive. To be misinformed as well.
For boys, the incel and alpha male shit is what I see really affecting their life trajectories. Once they get into those mindsets they start to repel good influences and quickly end up in echo chambers. The only people who will put up with them are equally toxic and they feed off each other and quickly spiral. A good boy can turn into a woman hating rebel that doesn’t listen to any adults shockingly quickly.
Unfortunately, I do not know specifically where this content lives for you to block. I’d definitely start with YouTube and tiktok. Also, talk to your kids about this stuff! It’s great that you’re trying to responsibly manage their Internet access. A lot of parents don’t, and everything you’re protecting them from on their electronics they can easily pick up from others at school. Even if you homeschool to prevent this eventually they’ll grow up and leave the nest. The only holistic way to give them the best shot (no method is guaranteed, they still have free will) is to teach them the critical thinking skills and morals they need to identify and reject this stuff on their own.
From personal & anecdotal experience, I think exposing kids (and adults) to a life of wide variance helps inoculate from echo chambers. My parents dragged me to my grandparents’ place in the countryside one weekend a month or more where cell service didn’t exist and internet was dial up. It got annoying at times and I don’t think it was perfect but spending so much time playing in the woods helped get my energy out, fostered a different kind of creativity, and often made me get out of my own head. Whatever was going on at school, drama via texting, or me just raging bc I sucked at video games didn’t seem so important when I was so far away. One of the most valuable parts of the Army was the people, the opportunity to truly meet and learn to work with people you wouldn’t have otherwise. Even in public school, you tend to stick to your clique and at its most diverse you’re really only meeting people you live in the area with. But the Army was different; the US is a freaking huge country with a ton of different subcultures. I learned a lot at an early age just by asking people where they grew up and what it was like. It introduced nuance and spoke against stereotypes in a way a lot of people need, and that diversity of experience helped a younger me appreciate that things aren’t always what they seem.
It’s easy, as a young man especially, to be in one place doing one thing and get really worked up about something, and echo chambers work towards that in many ways. It helps to physically move to somewhere else and burn off some energy. I find it much easier to reframe things when my physical environment is changing and I don’t have such a huge pile of energy to act as fuel to the online flame wars. It helps to know in the back of my mind, however worked up I get, that “I’m angry now, but there is a place I can go where none of you losers matter and however big and loud and frustrating you are here, you are so small and quiet and barely existent when I go to that place.” And if I can go somewhere else and have those loud, dumb, frustrating things shut up, then maybe they’re not that loud or intimidating or big or even frustrating at all. At least not big enough for me to spend so much time thinking about it.
TL;DR: In the short term, moving around (physical motion/travel) helps. In the long term, moving around (longer term trips and travel to new places & experiences) helps.
Absolutely this.
YouTube is a fucking fascism treadmill.
I don’t even have an account and I watch a YouTube video from Lemmy, and the next recommended video is some “influencer” flaming the hate train but disguised as a pseudo thought piece.
Social media/mmo games.
Anything with infinite scroll should not be accessed be anyone under 18.
Algorithm based social media is my second big nono. YouTube can be fine as long as no algorithms are involved.
Any social media app should never recommend connections, my SO works with at risk children and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of a kid getting groomed because a rando added them on Snapchat. Random connections enable perverts. Discord is just as bad for the same reason.
Either way limiting screentime is extremely important, but just as important is technological education. Kids these days have no idea how to navigate the Internet because most adults can’t do it properly. Educate yourself always when educating the next generation.
Right now I think it’s a three way tie between mainstream social media, online gambling, and right-wing influencers.
YouTube
I have two kids and I won’t allow them to watch YouTube until they’re teens or if I watch the vids with them.
Between ElsaGate, disinformation, sexism, and just disgusting ads that play on there…and then there’s YouTube Shorts for brainrot…you can’t just blindly allow them access. Even the “kids” version of YouTube is fucking terrible.
I download Ms Rachel’s videos and play those from my Plex server for them if I need a break or have chores/dinner to do and need a hour to distract them. No ads or auto play videos or anything else.
For your teens, best you can do is make sure they use an ad blocker if possible and teach them how to vet info. I hear people at work say the stupidest “alpha male” sound bites and a simple Google search proves shit wrong 99% of the time, yet these idiots gobble it up.
There’s lots of good content on YouTube but it’s best curated and served offline. Jellyfin FTW
Jellyfin is great! Unfortunately I’m neck deep in Plex…been using it for 10+ years now…I have a Jellyfin instance spun up but sharing it out to others is a pain, but works well on my Tailscale.
My son is obsessed with Lego videos. There are a few good channels on YouTube. I only let him watch when I’m in the room with him because it gets shady real quick.
Restrict the channels to be the good ones (3b1b, kurzgesagt, the gray cuber, lines that connect, twoswap etc) and put an adblocker on there and it just becomes an amazing resource for passive teaching
Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, Tim Traveller, Robwords.
xkcd, two minutes physics, sebastian lague, peza’s work, CPG grey, branch education, …
I’m pretty much in a progressive bubble on YouTube, but I had a look at the “hyped” list yesterday and it’s all right wing extremist bullshit.
Anything could be harmful. They haven’t been taught how to discern whether a source is credible. They’ll just believe what people tell them if they see no reason to doubt. I do think that just because misinformation exists, that doesn’t necessarily mean your teen will buy into it forever. I think being misled is part of the process of learning how to identify trustworthy sources. Rather than controlling access to information, reinforcing your kids’ understanding of logical and evidence-based reasoning will pay off in the long run.
tiktok insta youtube
imo they’re worse than porn.
Yep! Seeing a titty isn’t the same as wanting to restrict women’s rights and wanting to lock up immigrants for existing.
Other people covered the sneakily harmful stuff that’s publicly accepted. I’m still gonna say 4chan. I assume it’s still up. I like to think I grew out of it or that I had a good filter as a teen, but I’m sure it negatively affected my views at least for some time. But half of the evil shit just seemed funny. You can’t tell who is serious and who is trolling because they’re all in the same thread together, feeding equally. So now I’m occasionally reminded of the actual death, mutilation, and harm I saw there.
I don’t know what other boards are similar and active. I don’t know what other modernized sites have joined that niche. I’m aware regular social platforms push harmful conspiracy and fringe theories and create their own spiraling echo chambers. 4chan is still a terrible place.
Damn, I just went on /b/ for the first time in like 20 years. It’s as terrible as it ever was.
I might be off on the details, but about a year ago, the founder lost control of the site and it went down. He called all the users terrible people. Someone else picked it up and continued within like a week. Interesting take on the founder/long term operator.
Forgot to mention there’s the epstein connection to /pol/. Insane.
So yeah, it’s not just echo chambers. There’s plenty of accessible terrible places still around.
I’d say TikTok and Instagram. I think short form media is probably already inherently bad for attention span in itself but the kind of content most teens especially seem attracted to on those platforms makes it double as bad.
anything big corporation controlled imo. Maybe not always all the time, but that is actively trying to harm people. They wont call it harm, but that is what it is.
Anything that scrolls infinitely and provides content via algorithm. Shit, it’s harmful for anyone, but especially impressionable teens.
Big tech social media for sure (especially the video platforms). Their algorithms are predatory as fuck.
Just the other day here there was a guy that killed his wife because she wanted a divorce, and his messages were stuff like “I am an alpha” and shit like that, mentioning stupid “influencers” and “coaches”. This is just one more idiot who was brainwashed by targeted content tailored to create echo chambers that breed extremism because it drives up engagement and ad revenue.Not to mention the endless barrage of short videos is destroying people’s attention span and ability to think - there isn’t even time to reflect on the content, you just “react” and move on. AI is probably creating a huge negative impact on learning capability too.
Yea our brains were not meant to deal with a barrage of meaningless stimuli all day
Would also add the far-right heavy social media and boards.
Instagram is my answer
If you’re worried about misinformation, the most dangerous places are main stream media and a bad algorithmic selection on youtube or other “endless scroll” websites.
And the main stream media thing not because it’s obvious nonsense, because they having specific wording and focus you don’t really see until you look for it, so it looks balanced and fine and high quality, but you only get a good sense of what’s going on by reading from multiple international sources, even bad ones and noticing the differences in focus and tone and thinking about it.
If you have a source or person you trust implicitly, be sure to check them in depth from time to time. How they report on different topics and such. E.g. is it always pro or contra something.
