Technology

Why the fuck are kids on Meta services?

Statistically speaking, that means a child gets sexually harassed on Facebook every 0.864 seconds.

When I was on facebook, many years ago, I was friends with my tween nieces. I wanted to stay a presence on their pages so that they would have someone to turn to if they had problems.

I CANNOT FUCKING TELL YOU HOW MANY PROBLEMS WERE HAD.... JFK that place is a nightmare for young girls.

I fucking hate all meta platforms now. I've been on Facebook since the day it went public (allowing anyone to join instead of just college students) and it's just a nazi recruitment platform now. There is not accountability for bad behaviour, in fact they reward trolls and punish people for dairing to defend themselves.

If I'm harrassed it doesn't go against community standards but if I defend myself I get banned for 30 days for bullying.

It's fucked up and it's deliberate. I've actually gotten a ban for two emojis 🐓🍭 got me a ban but bigotry and hate speech are a ok. Ironically even Jewish people aren't safe on meta platforms. Antisemitic behaviour is rampant, even way before the Gaza war so its not people who give a shit about Palestine.

Now they should shut down those spy apps, I mean social media apps.

I love the line about "we have 30 tools for [preventing this thing that keeps happening from happening] ". It's marketing-speak all the way down. Like, wow! Thirty tools!

I wonder how they got that 100,000 number. Does Meta see the messages sent over their platforms?

It's a GOOD thing those platforms are mainly used by Republicans nowadays! SURELY they'll put an end to it right? Republicans aren't sexually harassing children right?

These corporations are like honey badgers. They don’t give a shit as long as the profits keep increasing. I think I just dated myself.

It's tempting to just pile on with "Meta bad" here as most of us believe that for a multitude of good reasons, but how would likely alternatives handle this better? Most of us on Lemmy are strongly in favor of encrypted messaging for example. As the article mentions, that makes monitoring by third parties impossible.

What if we got all the kids to come to the Fediverse instead of InstaTok? Would-be abusers would most certainly follow. Will Fediverse admins moderate for child safety better than corporate social platforms? Will teenagers want to stay on tightly-moderated servers?

I don't think the solutions are as simple as "Meta should stop being shitty and care about the harm it enables".

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Meta estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day, including “pictures of adult genitalia”, according to internal company documents made public late Wednesday.

The unsealed legal filing includes several allegations against the company based on information the New Mexico attorney general’s office received from presentations by Meta employees and communications between staff.

The filing is the latest in a lawsuit initiated by the New Mexico attorney general’s office on 5 December, which alleges Meta’s social networks have become marketplaces for child predators.

Meta issued a statement in response to Wednesday’s filing: “We want teens to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online, and we have over 30 tools to support them and their parents.

In a July 2020 internal Meta chat, one employee asked: “What specifically are we doing for child grooming (something I just heard about that is happening a lot on TikTok)?” According to the complaint, he received a response: “Somewhere between zero and negligible.”

Yet, an internal 2017 email describes executive opposition to scanning Facebook Messenger for “harmful content” because it would place the service “at a competitive disadvantage vs other apps who might offer more privacy”, the lawsuit states.

The original article contains 606 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

But do they have cred?