Summary
Social media influencers are fuelling a rise in misogyny and sexism in the UK’s classrooms, according to teachers.
More than 5,800 teachers were polled… and nearly three in five (59%) said they believe social media use has contributed to a deterioration in pupils’ behaviour.
One teacher said she’d had 10-year-old boys “refuse to speak to [her]…because [she is] a woman”. Another said “the Andrew Tate phenomena had a huge impact on how [pupils] interacted with females and males they did not see as ‘masculine’”.
“There is an urgent need for concerted action… to safeguard all children and young people from the dangerous influence of far-right populists and extremists.”
I swear people refuse to take accountability for anything. It’s not social medias fault. This is POOR PARENTING. Plain and simple.
People won’t even take accountability for believing this phony clickbait headline.
Poor parenting is certainly an issue, but saying “it’s not social medias fault” is like saying the opioid epidemic “isn’t Purdue’s fault”. The people who manufacture and distribute the addictive and harmful product should be the first ones we go after. No amount of individual accountability will solve the problem as long as multi-billion dollar corporations are pumping this shit out 24/7.
So over a few years millions of parents decided to collectively take a hard pivot into bad parenting? Couldn’t possibly be an unprecedented media environment with algorithmic targeting?
iPad babies.
No but a generation? Yes 1000%. Parents are responsible for their children. Their media usage, their behavior at school, literally everything. A child can not be held accountable by themselves. It won’t ever happen without teaching them. Parents are responsible for teaching their kids manners.
If you believe the answer to this problem is banning social media, you are not looking any deeper than this article and are falling for click bait.
As a parent with kids who are starting to dip their roles into the digital age, I would also say this is mainly a parenting issue, but the economic “squeeze” is the other part.
There are so many tools available to manage the content your kids consume - ad blockers, family accounts with monitoring and management, ect. I may be biased as I’m in the IT profession, but if you live in this digital age and claim ignorance on anything technology related then it’s no wonder we are on the state we are in.
Many of the responsibilities the US government agencies used to take on themselves have been eroded to be handled by the individual, coupled with a subscription society for the or day to day appliances and tools we use. After working a full time job M-F, and if I don’t have after hours tasks to handle I get maybe 1 hour worth of family before it’s time to pack it up for the night. Weekends are typically house work or chores. I consider myself fortunate to have that much. Squeeze in management of my kids content intake and that’s just more time taken away from everything else on the list.
I’ll do it though because I’ll be damned if my kids grow up like these kids are now.
If you believe there should be no accountability or oversight for the richest companies ever that have deep personal access to billions of people across the globe, you should wake to the realities of the 21st century.
He didn’t say that. Social media companies should be punished and regulated to a certain extent, but saying that they’re the only ones to blame here is frankly bollocks. It’s the same discussion we’ve had with violent video games.
Ignorant parents use this to excuse their lack of action for their kid’s use of social media. What they could and should do is to not allow kids access to it or to monitor their traffic. This however requires willpower, time and effort to understand and implement this into daily life. Which either they don’t have or don’t want to do. This brings us to one of the causes of the low fertility rate for younger generations: it takes more nowadays to raise a child and younger generations are more responsible about raising kids than older generations.
Excessive regulation of social media for kids will massively affect our privacy. Certain European apps now require facial or id verification to use in order to prove you’re old enough. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to give out my ID or let them photo my face just to watch a movie just because some parent isn’t responsible enough to educate their kid.
Sounds like absolving social media to me.
The complexity of social media engineering and the scope of its impact is unprecedented. It’s not at all the same thing as video game or TV panic. When you account for how much real-life peer discussion is driven by these platforms, protecting your child from this toxic rhetoric is nearly impossible.
You used to have to show your ID to rent a movie in person, why is doing it online any different? If you (rightfully) are concerned about data collection and surveillance, push for legeslative protections on that topic. This is a completely separate issue with a very clear root cause.
Because that data is stored and passed on to third parties in most cases. Because data breeches are a common occurrence nowadays. Because gorvernments and companies can use that data against you later on.
“Oh, that person has a nasty burn on his face? Why don’t I save that and pass this information to a face cream company?”
“Oh, this person is a refugee from another country? Why don’t I just pass this information to the government so they can see what they’re watching?”
It’s most definetly not like buying liquor when you briefly show your ID to the cashier.
The EU and California have already done that and the results are rather poor since it’s difficult to properly enforce. You can slap fines on said companies, but that’s only a setback. It doesn’t stop them especially when you have a weak government like the US has right now.
No, it’s not. You’re sacrificing privacy and liberty for everyone just to fix mostly a parental issue.
The solution is to give those laws teeth. Harsh regulations on platforms that serve unmoderated content open to everyone. Enforce transparency on content serving algorithms. Massive penalties for security breaches. Ban platforms that don’t comply.
If you’re worried about state actors having access to your clearnet data, that’s pretty much unavoidable in the internet age. You can lessen that by pushing against the digitization of society. You shouldn’t need a smart phone or internet service to live daily life.
Support brick-and-mortar stores, your local library, a local hobby group. Campaign against always-online car features, IoT e-waste, traffic surveillance laws, etc… Don’t make me choose between subjecting children to a stream of unregulated bullshit and the right to privacy. It’s a false dichotomy propped up by our need for digital convenience.
Alright. Then get every single country on Earth to pass the same stringent regulation and invest in measures to enforce it. If you can’t do that, then you can’t effectively protect kids against stuff like this. Taking away rights with the pretext of security for every little thing is how democracies fall.
Don’t make me choose between my privacy and someone’s lack of responsibility. I shouldn’t have to give up my rights just because someone can’t supervise their child. Like you’ve said, technology is here to stay. I’m not going to limit my freedom like that over a non issue like this.
I’m just curious… How did you sign up for internet service? Can you walk me through the process?
Sighs. Signing up and giving personal informations to a few services is fine. Your ISP, your bank, your doctor. That’s fine. You know who they are, you remember them, you can keep an eye on them.
Doing this for every possible service on the internet is not. I guarantee you can’t remember all the sites you’ve made an account to and that you probably didn’t read the ToS for each one. If you add a requirement that each one of these sites to verify users through ID or face verification, it massively increases the risk that your data will leak to undesired parties. The state can’t keep track of all of them the same way you can’t do it. They’re just too many. It’s possible that at one point one of these companies will have a data breach or will break regulation. Then your online data (in this case your face and your ID) is up for grabs.
What if a police officer were to randomnly stop you on the street and check your pockets to ensure you’re not carrying child porn? What if they suspect you’re hiding child porn in your underwear? Should we make a law giving the right to police officers to strip you naked just so we can make sure you’re not doing anything illegal? We have to protect children right? Nothing is more valuable right?