You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.
replyLet’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.
Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.
replyBut could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?
replyBingo. And algorithmic social media feeds reward fringe opinions—the more hateful the better—because those drive “engagement” which translates to attention, fame, money. Which means people are incentivised to be as controversial as possible. They don’t even have to fully believe what they preach, they just have to ensure they can enrage a large enough number of people. Which in turn brings the people who really believe those things out of the woodwork and the slime ball of hate gets bigger and rolls faster.
replySocial media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.
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