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.
I mean this is why I stopped using social media 10 years ago. Bunch of nonsense drivel, everyday.
I’m not victim blaming, this shit shouldn’t happen, but if you are on a platform and that platform has shit moderation and you keep seeing content you don’t like, well, maybe you should leave that platform? I mean this is why we all left reddit, right?
If I walk into a wall once, then it’s an accident. If I keep walking into it, then I’m just stupid.
Genuine question: What do you categorise this comment as, other than you using social media?
I keep falling into the same trap as well, when telling people I quit using “social media” but am very much active on social media platforms - just not the ones controlled by big tech.
Maybe we need a shorthand for “profit-driven algorithm-controlled influencer cesspools” so we can separate it from “non-profit decentralized social media platforms” like Lemmy and Mastodon?
It’s called the Social Graph. Platforms that implement a social graph are social media.
The fact that people don’t know this basic, fundamental mechanism is the problem. Even the technologically inclined haven’t been able to make this simple distinction.
People think “social media” means a place for people to be social. That’s not it. Social media is specifically platforms that implement the social graph and/or similar types of algorithms that are designed to manipulate sociological relationships.
Traditional message boards are not social media because there is no algorithm. In the past reddit wasn’t social media because it technically did not have a social graph. It was a simple aggregrator with comment sections. That alone does not make social media. reddit does have a social graph now. That’s when it became social media.
Lemmy doesn’t have social graph algorithms.
The social graph is quite possibly one of the most dangerous inventions the 21st century and nobody talks about it. Yet it rules your entire life. It’s what makes the world turn. It’s what is dictating cultures and societies. It’s what is determining what goes viral. It determines the daily headlines.
You have a very restricted definition that doesn’t seem to be common. “Social graph” is not mentioned once on the Wikipedia page of “social media”, nor the Britannica, nor the Cambridge dictionary, nor Merriam Webster. While they are not specialized sources, I think they reflect the common usage of words. By those definitions Lemmy seems to be a social media.
This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.
Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.
Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.
As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.
One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.
A stronger distinction could be made for the use of graphs on a widespread scale. That’s what I meant when I said lemmy doesn’t have a graph. The data structure itself is benign. When it becomes dangerous is when you’re playing god mode by dictating what individuals see. When that is applied that across the entire platform then you’re controlling entire societies. This is “the algorithm” that people speak of in common parlance even though they don’t know the underpinnings of it. It’s such a simple concept but extremely dangerous to humanity.
You can block on individual if they annoy you. This is a basic feature that existed on old forums and chat software. A single edge on a graph millions or even billions is insignificant. It’s a silly retort anyways that trolls use, thinking it makes them sound smart. Ignoring one or even a few idiots isn’t going to alter your algorithm. Not relative to the system as a whole which is orders of magnitude greater.
If anything the block feature is an antidote to algorithms that decide what we see. For some reason people don’t see anything wrong with having to be forced to confront your polar social/political opposites all the time. I can’t remember where I heard or read about this but studies shown that this does not work. It’s not productive.
The thing that people have to get over is that “the algorithm” isn’t correct by default. You’re not losing anything by blocking users or breaking from it entirely. There’s been more than enough evidence over the years that they do much harm. I have yet to see much strong evidence that they are beneficial. What has society gained from it? There’s nothing but sales pitches for adtech firms telling us that they have mastered how give us the best social experiences. Where’s the proof of that.
Hey thank you for the term drop! I haven’t heard of “social graph” and it falls into my “feelings” of what social media has been for me(or what I hate about it(algorithms)). I am definitely a “one in ten thousand” today for this.
Maybe, but I’ve definitely seen people disagree about what constitutes social media - e.g. some thing youtube is or isn’t, other people lemmy/reddit are or aren’t, it seems pretty inconsistent. Maybe it’s a generational thing?
In this sense, yes to Reddit and YouTube. YouTube may not be very social but it clearly has an algorithm that pushes toxic content/stereotypes.
And im going to say no on Lemmy. Lemmy may be social but there’s no algorithm pushing toxic content. Maybe I’m missing it but there’s seems to be very little toxic content.
I don’t consider Lemmy or other message style boards as social media.
We aren’t posting pictures of ourselves or posting updates of our lives on here. We don’t use our real names(or I hope we don’t).
Please define social media for me, because it seems like everyone’s take on it is “a website where you interact with others”, which is way too broad and I would say that applies to the entire internet then, which is a slippery slope.
*Edit, another post linked the “Social Graph” which I think encapsulates what social media is vs. what it is not.
That is effectively the definition from my understanding. Lemmy, Reddit, and similar boards are social media because the content is primarily user-generated.
It probably feels like the entire internet because it’s where many of us are spending most of our time.
Yeah and I don’t accept that definition. Is GitHub social media then? Is the LTT forums social media? Is Wikipedia? Nexus mods? All of these sites contain “user generated content”.
Because I would say none of those sites are social media sites. But all of these loose definitions are being thrown around and next thing you know you’ll need to verify your ID to look at any Wikipedia article.
No. All walls should be padded because we assume everyone is going to walk into them…
Depends if an algorithm is going to pop that wall in front of everyone repeatedly. Ideally, pad the wall, fix the stupid algorithm, and prosecute the creators of both.
So suicide, then? That’s your suggestion?
That’s not what they said at all.
Keep walking into that wall bud.