> 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.
@neil Yeah, I feel like offering men opportunities to improve and consequences for failing to do so may be more helpful here than a social media ban.
A grown man harassing a teenage girl online is unacceptable, but unfortunately that behavior predates social media.
@neil Sadly not just social media. Same is as true in the press (where female chancellors get mocked as Rachel from accounts, or for their outfits) - I'm not sure social media is the source of the problem somehow.
Likewise I think a social media ban is a bad idea (and a disaster for disabled kids) - we need to actually fix social media, which means like a pub some people need to be shown the door and told not to come back
@etchedpixels @neil I don't feel that social media is the source of the problem, but I do feel that it adds fuel to the fire at a speed at which we have never had to cope before. That's not to say I support a ban, I don’t, but there needs to be some really thoughtful interventions, regulations, and societal change to make a real difference.
But that sounds hard doesn't it. Probably requires money. Easier just to ban it and make money for the data brokers with their ID verification.
@etchedpixels @neil while I agree fully with the sentiment, I've shied away from pub comparisons due to the awkward fact that unaccompanied minors are banned from them.
It's probably closer to banning children from the park because there might be a bad man lurking in the bushes...
@neil the depressing reality is that a group of (mostly) male, rich, powerful people (MPs and the broader British political class) are now discussing further punishing this group of young people by isolating them from any support they'd otherwise be able to find.
Meanwhile the Online Safety Act is slowly making it more and more difficult for proper social media - circles centred around interests, passions and identities - to exist. Driving more users into all the platforms this young person talks about here - Instagram, TikTok etc.
Once again, politicians have taken a problem, been offered nine hundred and ninety nine solutions and picked option 1000 - make everything worse.
@neil we've got to find a way to make society in general consider women as people rather than as objects.
An important read for everyone; this misogynistic behaviour is ‘normalised’ by actions of authorities, such as the IOC testing womens hormones [not ‘female’ enough], of online persona such as Andrew Tate, or the repellent comments from POTUS […. Whether the women like it or not], and a million tiny actions every single day. #Misogyny I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day | Anonymous | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/23/15-year-old-girl-misogyny-social-media-online-abuse
@neil Yeah, only adult women should be subjected to the vile misogyny. 🧐🥴
(It's a problem, no argument; I fail to see how isolating minors from communities they can find online is necessarily the answer, though.)
@PjpB @neil @rpbook As someone who first came online at 13, and made some lifelong friends (leading to family) early on, I take great exception to the characterization of online friends not being real friends.
Your experience of the Internet clearly does not align with mine (and others, hi Russell!), so please refrain from telling others how they should experience life — your way is not The Way.
And ha ha, sorry @neil if that felt like I was ignoring your functional +1; I felt like it went without saying when I wrote it but while I was already replying to your toot, I'd tagged @rpbook in on my reply because I wanted to include them in the continued discussion but didn't want to reply to their toot directly (as if I was calling them out), and then after the fact it felt rude to exclude you.
Because, you know, I consider you a friend. Weird, right? 😅
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.
@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.
@passwordsarehard4 @darwinwoodka @osma @neil when I ever modded anything and this popped up, that person would be on my radar & their life would be made more miserable one way or another. Ban, modify their text, delete aspects of their profile, go nuts.
Letting it skate bc oh well they'll just make a new account is just shit moderation. And Zucks promoting this behavior, not at a loss to prevent it, his sites have tools galore to stop it if they wanted.
@Finitum @passwordsarehard4 @darwinwoodka @osma @neil
Yes this. We’d ban the bastards & if they came back we’d ban them again.
That could still work - even more so when losing an account with any significant following.
But it’s a scaling problem. On the old-internet the number of mods - real human mods who were part of the community - grew with the user base.
That doesn’t happen, and will never happen, with coporate social because to them moderation is a cost centre not a community service!
Social media has also helped incredible amounts of people though. It's allowed marginalized minorities to find people like them. It's allowed people to organize against oppressive governments.
It's also curated local events and increased turnout and access to so many things for so many people.
We can say "burn it to the ground" and part of me wants to agree, but... It would harm a lot of people too.
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil yes, for whatever the real problems of social media there are also a bunch of things that aren’t problems with social media, that it’s nevertheless blamed for.
The Brianna Ghey case always comes to mind here: it’s been framed retroactively by her mother as a social media problem and used to argue in favour of a ban. But she wasn’t bullied online: she was bullied and murdered by people who she knew in person. Social media was in fact a safe place for her, where she found support. (It’s becoming increasingly clear that the ‘problem’ her mother perceives with social media is that it ‘turned her trans’.)
And that’s a more general pattern, I think, though not as extreme in most cases: a lot of LGBTQ young people have found support that way when they wouldn’t have been able to do so pre-internet. Age-restricting access to social media — and to LGBTQ-oriented content more broadly — seems directly harmful in those cases.
And then again for example that Guardian piece. It sounds awful — but I don’t think an age limit is the answer. Is misogyny towards adult women supposed to be okay? Either mandate that social media companies address the problem effectively, or ban them entirely — a ban for under-16s is just for the sake of looking like they’re doing something without it actually being meaningfully effective.
(Edit: to be clear I don’t think a social media ban would be positive overall, or even that it’s a workable concept — how do you define social media? — but it would at least make more sense than an age limit.)
To be clear, while this article is focused on teen girls, this is the stuff every minority sees on social media as well.
I'm trans. I have to actually relegate myself to only small corners of the internet because everywhere else feels so unsafe.
Meta no longer considers slurs and harassment of trans people as "against their policies." So any Meta platform is insufferable for me now.
Twitter actually encourages harassment of trans people and made the word "cis" a bannable offense.
And if I stray too far from the queer spaces of Reddit, I'll get called a man and doxxed pretty quickly.
I've been doxxed while using Insta in the past simply for existing as a trans person.
But the algorithm is the problem here. It's force feeding hate to kids and teaching them that it's good to hate. Monetizing hate is the issue and is what should be regulated.
@CordiallyChloe @benjamineskola @osma @neil
What about normalising safe space culture?
(& Fossify?)
@benjamineskola It's also worth bearing in mind that "protecting the children" is a smokescreen, not the objective, and it's not even about being seen to be doing something. If it were about that, they'd be acting on expert advice instead of steamrolling over it.
This is about forcing identification of everybody online, and suppressing the ability of people to connect - especially queer folk.
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil Ban capitalist social media(*) and everyone migrates to the fediverse or what comes next.
(*) defined as all the aspects that make it profitable
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil The point is that "ban capitalist social media" is a demand our side can rally behind.
Unlike "ban social media" which is intentionally divisive and fucks over everyone who depends on it for a lifeline, or "ban kids from the internet" which largely does the same and also suppresses participation by anyone who can't safely show ID and serves the interests of fascism and surveillance capitalism.
I won't rally behind "ban social media."
It includes places like Mastodon. This is still social media.
It would push out new start-ups bc they'd be unable to keep up with legislative requirements.
It would prevent LGBTQ people from accessing critical information and communities.
It would fracture organizations and groups that need it to survive.
Even if your argument is that we should be "negotiating high," it's still not a negotiation anyone will team up behind.
Try "ban hate speech" and negotiate down to "ban profit-driven algorithmic hate."
RE: https://mas.to/@osma/115926080124459252
This is not social media. Media has centralized editorial control.
@CordiallyChloe @dalias @neil
Mastodon is defined as *social* media.
You can nitpick, redefine, and hyperfocus on a word all you want. It doesn't change the fact that mastodon, bluesky, Facebook, threads, Twitter, reddit, TikTok, and Pixelfed are all considered social media by the wider public, meaning that's how it's handled, discussed, and defined.
I see people do this all the time with words like "transphobia." They say "a phobia is a fear. I'm not afraid of trans people." And that's wrong for a million reasons. And the hyperfocus on a root of the word doesn't change what transphobia is or what it means.
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil I explicitly said to reject "ban social media".
Rather "ban CAPITALIST social media".
If you don't like that wording, "ban monetization of peoples social interactions and networks". "Ban addiction-optimization feeds". Etc. The wording isn't the topic here. The concept is.
But "capitalist" isn't defined in any of our law. It's not something that can be banned effectively.
You're acting like you can just throw a word at the wall and make everyone act on it appropriately. It's like the whole "socialism is a good thing actually" argument. And then you get people from actual socialist countries who are like "no the fuck it is not." Like, the definition and the reality/application of it are two totally different things.
So sure, ban capitalist social media. Cool. We still lose Mastodon because someone is probably making money off it somewhere.
@CordiallyChloe @osma @neil *Sigh* I have already explained that you need to sit down and define a specific set of characteristics that "capitalist social media" depends on to be profitable. Banning a big enough subset of those to break them is then your concrete policy demand.
"Ban capitalist social media" is the goal you're trying to achieve with these policy demands, the motive for your supporters to support them.
@dalias @CordiallyChloe @osma @neil For example, a ban on collecting or using personal data for marketing purposes and on selling it for any purpose?
With the bonus of helping the rest of the web too.
@CordiallyChloe
> I won't rally behind "ban social media."
> It includes places like Mastodon.
That's true but "ban capitalist social media" doesn't include Mastodon.
It's a demand that (hopefully) would encourage Meta etc to dramatically improve, to avoid a ban.
Startups could avoid a ban by beginning with no mandatory/opt-out manipulative algorithms (easy) and proper moderation (harder but should be non-negotiable to avoid new nazi bars).
That's exactly why the right wing has been so persistent in taking control of it all. Twitter was one of our biggest sources of information and exposure. When Musk took it over, minorities immediately scattered. I know for a fact that MOST trans people left the platform immediately, fully deleting their accounts.
You can still find exposure to new thoughts and ideas through reddit and insta, but you have to choose it and you have to be prepared to filter out the slop and hate in the process. And that's a big ask for most people.
@neil It's a terrible argument for age restrictions. It's not good for adults either when this stuff flourishes. Get the law makers out there and regulate this shit. Make companies responsible if they don't find effective mitigations.
It's difficult to get the hands on these abusers. But the company can certainly work on this, block content with certain slurs.
If they can figure out how to differentiate a male from a female nipple, they can figure out verbal abuse especially in times of LLMs.
starryeyes
Neil Brown
manchicken
The Penguin of Evil
Daniel Durrans
woe2you
ahnlak
Matúš Chochlík
Ret
Colman Reilly
Jima 
PjpB
Passwordsarehard4
Russell Phillips
anyGould
Mark Down
Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦
Hedders
Cy
stephen
Darwin Woodka
Finitum
Leia
ChloChloaca
ben
✨Based Plant🎸
Kat S
Cassandrich
2something
trystimuli
Alys
rakoo
Joe Vinegar
Sheogorath