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.
The whole point of the algorithm is attention. Yeah, they could try to actually police it so coded versions of “kill yourself, ugly bitch” don’t spread, but that language works, and it makes the posters rich.
You can’t get around for “addiction for ad dollars” being the whole point. It’s always going to surface ragebait, trash talk or whatever because that’s what sells attention, no matter how hard it’s fought.
…So yeah. Policing isnt going to do anything. Don’t tell your representatives something that won’t work, and worse, has the “theatre” of helping.
I don’t know a good “solution” other than burning it all to the ground, but honestly, banning as many people as possible sounds like a good idea to me.
Why do you think going after the haters, taking their riches away, booting them offline and possibly imprisoning some of the worst, plus going after the operators of platform that spread hate “isn’t going to do anything”? We’re at the point now where there’s so much hate that it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel at first.
Yes you can.