Neil BrownFeb 23

> I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day

The examples included here are horrible. Not just the sex-shaming, but that too.

I'm far from convinced that a social media ban is the answer, but the comment is still well worth reading - especially by men.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/15-year-old-girl-misogyny-social-media-online-abuse

I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day

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

The Guardian
Show threadOsma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦Feb 23
I am increasingly convinced social media ban IS the answer. Not a ban for under-16, but a total ban. Commercial social media just quite simply has to be burned to the ground, no one even tries to run it safely any more.
@neil
Show threadHedders
@osma @neil The difficulty one runs into is how you define social media. It seems obvious, but it really isn't once you dig into it. What actually counts as social media? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc are all pretty obvious. Reddit, I guess. YouTube, presumably. Snapchat? WhatsApp? Yeah, maybe. Signal? Online forums? Usenet? Email lists? Anything where users can interact with other users? It gets tricky quite quickly.
Feb 23 at 4:40pmWeb
Show threadCyFeb 23
Well, that's what my father did when raising me, and look how I turned out!

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]
Show threadOsma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦Feb 23
Media is a service which exerts editorial control over its content. Relinquish that control, and it becomes a conduit for messages.
@hedders @neil
Show threadstephenFeb 23

@osma

This doesn't address any of the issues from the article in The Guardian. All those problems existed online on usenet and irc. Long before any company even considered making money from social interactions on the Internet.

Facebook, Twitter, et al are bad companies, but banning them is not going to fix any of the underlying issues.

@hedders @neil

Show threadOsma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦Feb 24
Girls were harassed on the streets before the Internet. But a hectabillionaire wasn't running an industrialized fake porn distribution and election meddling operation unchecked. Scale matters, incentives matter.
@dmaonR @hedders @neil
Show threadstephenFeb 25

@osma Musk's automatic porn machine is a big problem. But not social media. It was going to exist regardless. It is not everywhere because Musk owns twitter.

Scale does matter, but the scale is The Internet and the incentives pure capitalism. The only way to "ban" these away is to ban The Internet. Or ban capitalism. Which would be cool, but not something you can legislate.

If you turned off twitter tomorrow something would spring up in its place and be just as awful.