5 ms·

There's twice as much surface area. Bullies can now do their thing 24/7 from behind the screen _and_ still physically torment.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
Again, whatever they can do from behind a screen now, they could also do in your absence before.
- ab5tract 2y ago
  No, they couldn’t. Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your peers?
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Printers. If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create photoshopped images of you with?", why would you attribute that to social media?
    - bigfudge 2y ago
      Is it possible you are being thick here? Mentally rehearse the process of photoshopping your victims image and then printing it out and circulating it to everyone in the class before or at bedtime.
      - teamonkey 2y ago
        No, they were printed out, hung up around school, posted into lockers…
        lostlogin 2y ago
        I suppose it was all just as bad before printers too? You just did a lot of oil paintings. And prior to that you did some cave drawings?
        hackable_sand 2y ago
        Y'all are literally bullying here. The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn't just straight up mean.
        bigfudge 2y ago
        If it comes across that way apologies. I was honestly suspecting that the post I was replying to was being deliberately obtuse, but I guess it’s possible that this happened to them and it’s unduly salient as a consequence.
        hackable_sand 2y ago
        Y'all never stopped to consider their point. Let me give you an analogy: An apple takes 1 year to fall from a tree. An apple takes 1 seconds to fall from a tree. An apple falls from a tree. No difference.
    - lelandbatey 2y ago
      While technically true in describing the possibility, there is a big difference in ease between printing a photo and sending a message to a user via a digital platform e.g. WhatsApp. To physically bully you before with a compromising (but fake) photo, the bully would need to physically distribute said images to the presence of your friends and family, which requires time, knowledge of their location, etc. Not so now; if you used a social network and they could see connections to other users (such as family members) then they can just follow those connections by messaging those people directly. That difference in scale and ease for the bully is real vis-a-vis physically vs social media.
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Are you really trying to suggest that printing out 500-1000 copies of a photo and handing it out physically to all the kids in the school is the same as effortlessly spamming the same image out through online groups/chats? Come on, man.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      When I was at school, printers were expensive and bad, cameras weren't digital and film was non-trivial price to buy and also to develop, and the one single scanner we had was one-bit black and white. And normal people on the internet was told to never ever reveal their name or address to others online for fear bad people would misuse that info.
  - delusional 2y ago
    I dont mean to be nasty, but what sort of turbo nerds are bullying you if they decide to Photoshop images. Back in my day, bullying was about repeatedly keeping people out of the ingroup until they internalized their otherness. It was opportunistic. We didn't plan elaborate scenarios, we called him gay when he spoke about something he cared about. That was enough. If anything, social media would give that kid more opportunities to find a group that will accept them.
    - monkeyfun 2y ago
      Now imagine you're calling that kid gay constantly and you can look at all the worst stuff whenever you feel like to go mock it extra as a bully. And they only have to know it's you if you feel like it. (Anxiety's a big thing to remember there too, anxiety and obsessions and any historical traumas) It's not a world of difference, but it might explain why it's not as stark as you might expect at worst.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Even just as text, they can easily take your name and spread rumours speaking as if they were you. Even just as text, you can get dog-piled: we evolved to be social creatures, and for groups of 150-200; for most of us, if we're called names by that many people in quick succession, it breaks us. That's a small online mob, as these things go. But bullies these days also have effectively zero marginal cost cameras, so they can take as much video as it takes waiting for you to mess up, then do a Cardinal Richelieu — "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." In my day, you could take up to about 24 pictures quickly before needing to take the film out and put new film in, and that would take a while to develop and actually cost money, so that just didn't happen (that I've heard of). But it's not just taking photos of things that actually happened and misrepresenting them, even one picture is enough to put your classmates into AI generated porn… which is, as you may expect, a thing that kids these days are getting into trouble for doing. In my day, such image manipulation was manual and expensive* and therefore reserved for celebrities, though I doubt that's any real relief to Sarah Michelle Gellar in one example I remember, nor to GWB and (today the relatives of) bin Laden in the other. * we had a single copy of Photoshop… donated to the art department, which had only one (old) Mac on which to run it. Hard to pirate that kind of software back then even if you knew how to use it, definitely couldn't get unsupervised access to that machine. But it's not just still images these days, a brief audio recording of your voice and that can also be synthesised. Dictaphones were just starting to get affordable in my last year of mandatory education, and we pranked a teacher by mixing their last lesson with new age relaxation music, burning a CD of that, printed a cover saying something about curing insomnia, and giving it to them as a "last day gift". Now everyone has a dictaphone in their pocket, now you can synthesise anyone's voice saying anything, make images of them appearing to do anything. And a world where those things are, for now, still often treated as if they were real. But even just text, the internet made it a different world than when I was at school. The psychological impact of being told you, personally, are Officially Bad, that's something that sticks with us and hurts us even when it comes from a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism caused by someone on the other side of the planet who had no business talking to us in the first place; and that distant person can be incited to form part of a mob by a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism.
- saghm 2y ago
  Being able to do awful things more easily and efficiently is a qualitative difference even if the things themselves aren't objectively worse.
- khazhoux 2y ago
  It really seems you have not seen the way kids bully each other these days. Example: two kids were friends a year ago shared a lot of personal thoughts with each other. Now guess what? That was all recorded, because it was all in chat. Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past? Same with recording silly videos or taking photos of themselves to share with friends. When the relationship turns sour, that is raw material to humiliate the other.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past? Simple; the one kid tells everyone what the other kid said.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Human memory isn't photographic. Memories are biased such that we mostly don't remember the bad things our friends have said, we mainly remember the good. And the inverse for our enemies. When you change from one to the other, what didn't pass into long term memory can't just come back.
    - khazhoux 2y ago
      Not the same at all. Yes, that is a form of bullying, but it’s not nearly the same as having their own words, shared in confidence, blasted out to their peer group. But honestly, I can see you are fully committed to the premise that “things are exactly the same now as before” and so this discussion is pointless.
beenBoutIT 2y ago
The first country to outlaw social media for everyone under 18 will own the future.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

Again, whatever they can do from behind a screen now, they could also do in your absence before.

ab5tract 2y ago
No, they couldn’t. Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your peers?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Printers. If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create photoshopped images of you with?", why would you attribute that to social media?
  - bigfudge 2y ago
    Is it possible you are being thick here? Mentally rehearse the process of photoshopping your victims image and then printing it out and circulating it to everyone in the class before or at bedtime.
    - teamonkey 2y ago
      No, they were printed out, hung up around school, posted into lockers…
      - lostlogin 2y ago
        I suppose it was all just as bad before printers too? You just did a lot of oil paintings. And prior to that you did some cave drawings?
        hackable_sand 2y ago
        Y'all are literally bullying here. The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn't just straight up mean.
        bigfudge 2y ago
        If it comes across that way apologies. I was honestly suspecting that the post I was replying to was being deliberately obtuse, but I guess it’s possible that this happened to them and it’s unduly salient as a consequence.
        hackable_sand 2y ago
        Y'all never stopped to consider their point. Let me give you an analogy: An apple takes 1 year to fall from a tree. An apple takes 1 seconds to fall from a tree. An apple falls from a tree. No difference.
  - lelandbatey 2y ago
    While technically true in describing the possibility, there is a big difference in ease between printing a photo and sending a message to a user via a digital platform e.g. WhatsApp. To physically bully you before with a compromising (but fake) photo, the bully would need to physically distribute said images to the presence of your friends and family, which requires time, knowledge of their location, etc. Not so now; if you used a social network and they could see connections to other users (such as family members) then they can just follow those connections by messaging those people directly. That difference in scale and ease for the bully is real vis-a-vis physically vs social media.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Are you really trying to suggest that printing out 500-1000 copies of a photo and handing it out physically to all the kids in the school is the same as effortlessly spamming the same image out through online groups/chats? Come on, man.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    When I was at school, printers were expensive and bad, cameras weren't digital and film was non-trivial price to buy and also to develop, and the one single scanner we had was one-bit black and white. And normal people on the internet was told to never ever reveal their name or address to others online for fear bad people would misuse that info.
- delusional 2y ago
  I dont mean to be nasty, but what sort of turbo nerds are bullying you if they decide to Photoshop images. Back in my day, bullying was about repeatedly keeping people out of the ingroup until they internalized their otherness. It was opportunistic. We didn't plan elaborate scenarios, we called him gay when he spoke about something he cared about. That was enough. If anything, social media would give that kid more opportunities to find a group that will accept them.
  - monkeyfun 2y ago
    Now imagine you're calling that kid gay constantly and you can look at all the worst stuff whenever you feel like to go mock it extra as a bully. And they only have to know it's you if you feel like it. (Anxiety's a big thing to remember there too, anxiety and obsessions and any historical traumas) It's not a world of difference, but it might explain why it's not as stark as you might expect at worst.
ben_w 2y ago
Even just as text, they can easily take your name and spread rumours speaking as if they were you. Even just as text, you can get dog-piled: we evolved to be social creatures, and for groups of 150-200; for most of us, if we're called names by that many people in quick succession, it breaks us. That's a small online mob, as these things go. But bullies these days also have effectively zero marginal cost cameras, so they can take as much video as it takes waiting for you to mess up, then do a Cardinal Richelieu — "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." In my day, you could take up to about 24 pictures quickly before needing to take the film out and put new film in, and that would take a while to develop and actually cost money, so that just didn't happen (that I've heard of). But it's not just taking photos of things that actually happened and misrepresenting them, even one picture is enough to put your classmates into AI generated porn… which is, as you may expect, a thing that kids these days are getting into trouble for doing. In my day, such image manipulation was manual and expensive* and therefore reserved for celebrities, though I doubt that's any real relief to Sarah Michelle Gellar in one example I remember, nor to GWB and (today the relatives of) bin Laden in the other. * we had a single copy of Photoshop… donated to the art department, which had only one (old) Mac on which to run it. Hard to pirate that kind of software back then even if you knew how to use it, definitely couldn't get unsupervised access to that machine. But it's not just still images these days, a brief audio recording of your voice and that can also be synthesised. Dictaphones were just starting to get affordable in my last year of mandatory education, and we pranked a teacher by mixing their last lesson with new age relaxation music, burning a CD of that, printed a cover saying something about curing insomnia, and giving it to them as a "last day gift". Now everyone has a dictaphone in their pocket, now you can synthesise anyone's voice saying anything, make images of them appearing to do anything. And a world where those things are, for now, still often treated as if they were real. But even just text, the internet made it a different world than when I was at school. The psychological impact of being told you, personally, are Officially Bad, that's something that sticks with us and hurts us even when it comes from a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism caused by someone on the other side of the planet who had no business talking to us in the first place; and that distant person can be incited to form part of a mob by a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism.
saghm 2y ago
Being able to do awful things more easily and efficiently is a qualitative difference even if the things themselves aren't objectively worse.
khazhoux 2y ago
It really seems you have not seen the way kids bully each other these days. Example: two kids were friends a year ago shared a lot of personal thoughts with each other. Now guess what? That was all recorded, because it was all in chat. Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past? Same with recording silly videos or taking photos of themselves to share with friends. When the relationship turns sour, that is raw material to humiliate the other.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Fast-forward a year later and one kid absolutely humiliates the other by posting the private chats in a group setting. How the hell could that have ever happened in the past? Simple; the one kid tells everyone what the other kid said.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Human memory isn't photographic. Memories are biased such that we mostly don't remember the bad things our friends have said, we mainly remember the good. And the inverse for our enemies. When you change from one to the other, what didn't pass into long term memory can't just come back.
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    Not the same at all. Yes, that is a form of bullying, but it’s not nearly the same as having their own words, shared in confidence, blasted out to their peer group. But honestly, I can see you are fully committed to the premise that “things are exactly the same now as before” and so this discussion is pointless.

beenBoutIT 2y ago

The first country to outlaw social media for everyone under 18 will own the future.