542
Meta documents show 100,000 children sexually harassed daily on its platforms
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
542 points (98.6% liked)
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Why the fuck are kids on Meta services?
Instagram is still decently big among GenZ for still-photo content.
We mostly use it for stories, memes (including reels) and DMs
Source: I'm 13
And already part of the fediverse? Great!
Yup.
I post a bit too much on my plasmatrap account lol (@graphite@plasmatrap.com)
Gen z are mostly not children anymore. It's Gen Alpha
No, Gen z covers people as young as 11 or 12, which is a good guess for "kids on Instagram"
Because Meta/Tiktok/others don't effectively block them from their services, despite the illegality and knowing who is young and who isn't, due to the insane amount of data they collect.
A Facebook exec a while ago literally said that kids are the best demographic to get hooked on your platform.
Statistically speaking, that means a child gets sexually harassed on Facebook every 0.864 seconds.
on Facebook or Instagram or any other Meta Platform
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.
It's a nightmare for anyone who isn't a straight white american male really.
I imagine it's a cesspit even for them, despite them not having to deal with the same problems that young girls do.
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.
Cock lollipop? What am I missing here?
Cocksucker I'd imagine
Oh. 🤣
Yep
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I don't know, man, if you got banned from Facebook for calling somebody a cocksucker, it sounds like they are trying to hold right wingers accountable.
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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!
Apparently, it's just 30 failed approaches of the same tool.
I wonder how they got that 100,000 number. Does Meta see the messages sent over their platforms?
Once upon a time I sent my then boyfriend a nude on Facebook in a private message. An hour later my account got locked, I had to provide an ID card and prove my identity... Mind you, my profile looks normal and active, 80% of my friends where people in my city that I'd met personally, very few of those accounts had like fake names or nick names. My ex swears he did not report it.
After showing my ID, they unlocked my account. I was at work and a picture of my boobs pops up on that screen with Facebook asking me if that's the image I sent 😬 totally automated, except for the ID identification.
My only conclusion is that a system screened my personal conversation between me and my own then boyfriend.
a nude on Facebook in a private message
A private message on fb is still visible and scanned by fb. It is only private in the sense that asking your parents to give a nude pic to your boyfriend is private. The public cannot see it but the delivery service definitely can.
They store them in a database. Yes, they absolutely see them.
Wait so they see them and proceed to do nothing about it? What's the point of being able to see the messages then?
✨ targeted ads ✨
Targeted ads
Tech companies have learned that it behooves them to collect as much data as they can, even if they don't have a present use for it. And with AI being so data-hungry, it appears to be paying off.
you can send yourself pictures of your butthole and they have to look at it
Lifehack from nutsack
yes, absolutely they do.
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?
Instagram and Facebook aren't Republican things. They're normal people things.
Surely absolutely everything in life is about political bipartism!
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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".
I really hate this trend of downplaying valid points by saying "X bad", as if we need to lay out the argument against X, meta in this case, once again, or else we're just being idiots arguing blindly. Meta is bad and pointing out that this is just another reason why is fine.
Will Fediverse admins moderate for child safety better than corporate social platforms?
Sure, you just turn features off.
Will teenagers want to stay on tightly-moderated servers?
Maybe not, but at least we could sleep at night. Meta, on the other hand, sleeps at night on a big pile of money.
It's not our job to create solutions which they should have implemented years ago.
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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?
Maybe they need to get a backpack with a drink holder on the outside, so people can see their cred?
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