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.”

  • peteyestee@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    Sometimes I wonder if the Internet should only be allowed for people 21 or 25 years or older.

    21 is the new 16… 25 is the new 21.

    But… At the same time older adults are extremely dumb too.

    But giving a young person access to the Internet is like letting them walk NYC alone at night during the 70s.

    Ever since Facebook and 9/11 the Internet has been kind of awful.

    • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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      17 hours ago

      Honestly, at this point, I’m on board with just banning social media algorithms entirely. No more personalized feeds. You can have a website that publishes whatever you want, but you can’t tailor individual feeds to individual people. People can replace their “feed” with what the original internet was meant to be - visiting a series of websites. Want to read nothing but right wing blogs? Fine. You can spend all day navigating to different URLs for them. But no more spoon feeding individually personalized content to people.

      It turns out that method of content delivery is just a very dangerous and damaging technology that really fucks with the workings of the human mind. If you tell AI to build an ideal feed model for a person, it builds a nightmare that traps human beings in skinner boxes.

      We can ban these algorithms. We don’t have to continue to tolerate their existence. And in the grand scheme of history, it would be no different than a thousand other things that we discovered, at first thought was a panacea, but eventually decided the benefits weren’t worth the costs. Asbestos is a fantastic fireproof insulator, but we willingly let those benefits go in lieu of its severe respiratory effects. DDT is an incredible pest killer and insecticide, but it also was rendering entire species of birds extinct. Targeted, individually tailored social media algorithms create entertainment feeds that can entertain us to such degrees that the kings of old would lament their jesters in comparison. But what these algorithms are doing to us, what they are doing to our society? On political polarization? The effects they are having not just on children, but of people of all ages? We as a society need to recognize that the benefits just aren’t worth the costs. We are tearing our civilization apart for the sake of cheap entertainment.

      We need to ban targeted social media feeds. We have faced technologies like this before. We have made the choice before to give up the benefits of these things for the sake of the greater good. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. It is time we ban targeted social media feeds.

    • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Dude, we’re all stupid. We are all effected by the Internet and propaganda algorithms. We are not superior, most of us just don’t realise we’re programmed. Exactly the same as Gen Alpha, Zoomers, Gen X and Boomers. We’re all profiled and we all see how everyone else is a victim of indoctrination. That’s how this works, social engineering innit?

    • DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      is like letting them walk NYC alone at night during the 70s.

      One can get smart doing such—at times very quickly.

    • Realitätsverlust@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      The problem is that parents - apparently - have no interest in educating their children anymore. They just place their kids in front of a PC or give them an iPad so they can watch TV or something.

      Forbidding people from accessing the internet is going to raise a generation of children unfamiliar with it and then drifting off completely. Just look at the NK soldiers when they were shipped to russia and first had access to the internet. Half of them became porn addicts.

      • BenjiRenji@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        And also educating themselves. The kids will learn stuff, including slang, memes and concepts that are unknown to parents that don’t spend as much time on these platforms. So they won’t even recognize problematic ideas.

        • Realitätsverlust@lemmy.zip
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          23 hours ago

          Yes, because they think “I’m too old I don’t understand that anyways.”. That’s what my grandmother says when she needs her PC fixed, “I’m too old I don’t have to know that.” - well, guess what, if you call me every week for a problem that you could’ve fixed yourself by googling 3 minutes, it’s probably not a bad idea to learn it.

          Parents are responsible for their kids, and they should be learning what their child is doing and understanding it so they can intervene if shit goes south.

          • Mammothmothman@lemmy.ca
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            20 hours ago

            Parents should do a lot of things that they won’t because they are trapped in a stupid cycle of ‘it was good enough for me its good enough for them.’

    • pablodaniel@lemmings.world
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      21 hours ago

      Facebook was tame.

      It’s twitter, reddit, instagram, and tiktok that really set people off. They just weren’t prepared to handle the forces at play when you let people communicate with no accountability.

      Glad I grew up realizing that most people on the internet are just losers who can’t function in the real world so they use the digital space as a crutch.

      Really makes it easier to deal with the hysteria, apathy, narcissism, insecurity, and cognitive dissonance I see from many users.

      • peteyestee@feddit.org
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        20 hours ago

        I don’t mean that about Facebook. Facebook transitioned the Internet from being a cyber ecosystem of absolute freedom and anonymity where people existed freely with expression to a an extension of non-cyber life, I feel like people understood the internet was place where people were free, because it wasn’t real. The internet was not real life and that was almost universally agreed upon. After facebook the Internet became a place connected to real life identity and it became a base standard. …I think this helped create the real-world enshitification of our physical social communities. The transition to the idea that the Internet is real life is something that wasn’t talked about or agreed about.