World News

Shit is infuriating.

Let me guess the solution before reading the article - some form of weakening to digital privacy.

Yep: "A social media ban for under-16s might prevent young boys seeing endless content that treats women with contempt and hate. Boys at this age are very susceptible to the cool and funny framing of what is, in reality, relentless misogyny. A ban might not fix the problem, but it would help. If society can’t stop it, it can show it disapproves."

Essentially, this article is an argument to introduce online ID, and I disagree with that on a fundamental level.

The soil misogyny has dug it's roots into is the iniquity we created while seeking equity. It was done for the best of reasons, but now we see the price. That's not a problem we can solve easily, and certainly not via creating state spying infrastructure.

This isn't social media, it's social acid, dissolving and corroding everything.

Imagine if TikTok automatically tagged all content with #misogyny, #racism, #sexism and so on. And then published monthly reports on society trends. Like "In Feb 2026 racism went down 12%, misogyny went up 5%". I think it would be incredibly insightful and helpful.

While article tries to promote social media ban for under 16s, I strongly believe its just a way to sweep the problem under the rug. I think much more reasonable approach is to recognize those trends and deal with them through education and better parenting.

Don't use Instagram or TikTok ✅👍

Enragebait is a well known consequence of using a profit-driven Algorithm, i.e. enshittification.

15-year-olds are not being specifically targeted so much as caught up in the phenomena occuring overall.

Delete TikTok and Instagram for starters.

I was gonna say unpopular opinion, but maybe not...

disengage from social media. It is not reality. not only that, but it perpetuates itself, and the oligarchy that created it. Go out and meet people in the real world. This is comming from an autistic person with minimal patients for other people. Seriously, ditch social media; it's poison, and when it dies (which it will if people like you leave) these toxic peope you encounter will have to face the real world.

The age verification debate misses the real point. These commercial algorithms are harmful for everybody.

Report & Block. Those are options 29yr old guy here When Andrew Tate started blowing up i blocked or reported every single account that was sharing his stuff Its kind of easy. Also maybe dont use Insta. Use only youtube and then update the settings so you are not getting recomended anythging. Only what u r subscribed to Thats what i do. It is called "dont store any of my data type full privacy settings in youtube"

holy shit these comments

lemmy users stop being individualist-brained, victim-blaming misogynists challenge: IMPOSSIBLE

you don’t stop misogyny by just ignoring it you twats, and hot take, mainstream social media being filled with nothing but privileged assholes being bigots (because all the good people were told to just go somewhere else 😇) is not good, actually!

If anyone uses the word "female" to refer to women/girls, they instantly disqualify themselves from any right to be taken serious. Those people need a psychotherapist.

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.

That’s fucked up.

That level of misogyny is definitely learned, but it’s not just her age group. I’m floored by (for example) some comments my Dad makes, a “quiet, respectful, classy” type guy who’s never had a Facebook or Insta, who’d you’d never expect to hear insults from. And it’s definitely worse after he watches Fox News… that shit is like a drug.

My school “friends” dropped my jaw, sometimes. They got a lot from their parents, but social media (Faceboook back then) absolutely made it worse.

Even here on Lemmy, the disrespect or casual sexism from commenters sometimes makes me want to throw up. Not that I’m a particularly standup guy or anything, but the longer I live, the more I wonder “the fuck happened to my sex?” I certainly can’t critique this girl for wondering the same thing.

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.

This isn't new. I'm a man in my mid 40s and the disparity between how promiscuous men are viewed as compared to promiscuous women has existed for as long as I've been sexually aware, and well before.

Obviously that doesn't make it okay. I also have no idea what the solution might be. There have been a few cultural efforts to normalize the idea of women enjoying and seeking out sex but none of them seem to really reach the people that need to hear it.

I do find it oddly paradoxical that men who make it very clear that they are actively seeking sexual partners would disparage women for being sexually active.

i suppose it shouldn't be surprising but these comments sure are proving the articles point. i guess blaming the people being oppressed is a lot easier than blaming or even actually acknowledging the systemic oppression when you're a brickheaded fascist, especially when you're unaffected by/benefiting from it

Subheading:

Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see

No, they don't.

If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media

Aren't her parents like 35 or 40? She thinks people who are 40 don't understand social media? LMAO

The answer is to disengage yourself, and to teach your children AND OTHERS to disengage from social media.

Social media is harmful, advertising is harmful, drugs are harmful, gambling is harmful. This is a question of societal level harm and is is a problem for individual counties, nations, and states to address by the creation and enforcement of law, and for individuals to address by collectively shaming participants.

I'm a whole cisgendered 30 year old male who games a bit too much, so I try to discourage misogynistic comments when they're made by people in games.

I think there's another layer to the misogyny where any form of "defending" women is seen as white-knighting or simping. You don't even have to be directly referring to comments about a specific person, but you'll still be labeled as a loser who likes women, for some reason.

It baffles me to whine about the disgusting shit on short form video pop app for kids and then say this is what I use for Social media. How about not doing that? did you try to not do that? perhaps your problem is the doing of that and the Solution is to not do that?

I just don't believe all of this is real anymore. It's a fucking psyop! Men and women have different kinds of comments under posts. If a woman looks at the comments of Reel where a woman promotes the most depraved, objectifying a degrading things to do to guys with the sole purpose of making them suffer, they will only see comments of other women (rightfully) blasting OP in the comments. But when a guy opens the same comment section he will 99% see only comments of women encouraging other women to be the most evil things humanly possible.

It is not a conspiracy, it's a really effective way to farm engagement for basically free. We are letting them take control over society with the most obvious divide-et-impera tactics ever applied in human history

It's not only misogyny.

Social media absolutely removes the inhibitions of just about all kinds of assholes, builds pat-each-other-on-the-back support groups for them by putting them together with like minded assholes and then algorithmically shovels all that shit on everybody else because anything that elicits strong emotions means more clicks and anger from being offended is one such emotion.

By the way, this also applies to unhealthy gender expectations on males (including misandry), though this being The Guardian I expect this is about the UK, which IMHO (having lived there and also elsewhere in Europe) is a country with serious problems when it comes to gender expectations around women and insidious "benevolent" sexism ("benevolent" not because it's good but because it follows the whole "women are fragile creatures" and subsequent subtle disemplowering of women "to protect them" or because "they're emotional creatures") which far too often taints the articles in The Guardian because they're very much from the British upper-middle class Acceptable Feminism, which tends to underestimate the strength of women and favor "protection" "solutions" over empowerment and agency.

So whilst I absolutely believe in all of this and in misogyny online being very bad, especially in certain countries, the choice of focusing on misogyny rather than as a whole in the problem of social media's Profit Driven amplification of societal dysfunctions in general, is very much a typical privileged British Upper Middle Class "Third Wave Feminist" perspective and choice.