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.”
Where are the parents, if my son pulled that shit I would put him a position where he MUST listen to and work for women until he realizes how ridiculous he is.
Stories like this are what I think of every time the topic of regulating social media comes up.
We know it’s programmed to create rage machines. We do, and then people act surprised when social media works as designed.
Fake Sky News is also a rage machine.
Gotta remember… This is sky news. Probably fake. Especially since the “survey” doesn’t even match the headline.
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.
Wow it seems like everyone here is completely credulous and happy to have their bias confirmed.
In my opinion the huge difference between this generation and all previous ones is that content is no longer vetted by anyone. It used to be that to put something in front of kids it had to approved by some sane adult. If a TV station marketed to children something that most parents would not approve they would face protests or maybe even legal action. On social media any asshole can post literally anything and millions of kids will consume it without any supervision.
That’s the whole point of screaming about “liberal” or “leftist” media for all this time even when most media outlets are owned by for profit orgs. They usually have to comply with laws. On social media you’ve been able to lie as much as you want without consequence or being called out. Corporations mostly use this to market to children and get them addicted to gambling.
Most media is liberal though. Liberalism is a (right-wing) hegemonic ideology. CNN, Fox, NYTimes, NYPost, NPR… All liberal.
Not so much for leftism though. It’s “strange” how the right-wing conflates the two.
You know you’re actually right on the money, and it’s a little startling that it never occurred to me before. Shit.
Yep, that’s why the only way to be a good parent nowadays is to not give your kids smart phones or computers of their own. There was a time when it was kinda ok for them to have those devices, but that time is permanently in the past.
Closeted queer kids with bigoted parents need online safe spaces.
I mostly disagree with that. Cocooning up into a terminally online person makes one’s life worse, not better.
Straight up abusive parents are another thing of course. But even then those kids need sheltering, not the internet.
It used to be that to put something in front of kids it had to approved by some sane adult.
I love how you got a ton of upvotes by vaguely gesturing at the past.
When was this time you speak of?
What has changed is the social fabric of society has been ripped up.
Back when media for kids consisted mainly of broadcast TV shows and books. It’s not some mythical past; it’s my childhood.
First. If the kid doesn’t want to talk to the teacher then put the kid into detention until they will. If the kid misses more then a certain number of days of class. Make them take the entire grade again. Fail them.
Second (and I’m not sure how we would do this) cut them off from the internet. There are books in the library for doing research.
These kids already have been left behind by someone and they filled the void with people telling them it wasn’t their fault.
And your solution is to leave them even more behind? That’s just compounding the problem.
The solution is guidance and therapy. What you’re describing is retaliation.
Maybe check if Sky News is making stuff up first?
Second (and I’m not sure how we would do this) cut them off from the internet.
There are a whole bunch of ways to monitor, limit, and even cut off your kids internet usage. If you get your kid a cell phone or computer, you can install apps to monitor and limit what they watch and when. The fact that parents just let their kids freely use the internet with no supervision blows my mind.
This is totally a diffusion of social media issue. Twenty years ago, the media that kids had available for consumption was age rated. We had agreed as a society that certain things should not be visible to children until they grow up. It was possible to do because it was centralized (TV, movies, radio, print) and it was accountable to regulatory bodies and the rest of society. If a TV channel showed something as shitty as Tate style propaganda, there was institutional pushback, there were letters to the editor, there was someone specific to be targeted for accountability.
With social media being dominated by US style “freedom of speech” algorithms and US style acceptance of the impossibility (or even undesirability) of regulation and with completely unaccountable megacorps running them while giving very minimal if non-existent attention to who is watching what, we have a complete lack of age rating. We have given up on the idea of protecting childhood it seems.
Coupled with every fucking other issue being brought up in this thread, from COVID, to economic issues, to cultural misogyny, there is a perfect storm…
With social media being dominated by US style “freedom of speech” algorithms and US style acceptance of the impossibility (or even undesirability) of regulation and with completely unaccountable megacorps running them while giving very minimal if non-existent attention to who is watching what, we have a complete lack of age rating. We have given up on the idea of protecting childhood it seems.
…and you have clearly given up any pretense of not being extremely authoritarian it seems, what the hell does “freedom of speech algorithms” even mean? Rhetorically you are completely mixed up about what is going on and what the solution is, I am amazed you made it here to the fediverse.
We had agreed as a society that certain things should not be visible to children until they grow up.
Do you have evidence the systems we employed to do this actually didn’t make problems worse? As far as I can see, it is also just overly righteous adults desperate to fix the world in ways that don’t make them look inwards and question the policies they support and the beliefs they hold.
I missed a comma before “algorithms” it seems.
The kind of “extreme authoritarianism” you’re pearl clutching about is literally the age ratings system that was in place in the late 90s. Get a grip.
Countries, especially influential ones like the UK, that are suffering from this BS should band together and fine the shit out of megacorps like Google for allowing this filth to fester and the harm it’s done so far, and also threaten to revoke their operational rights if they don’t agree to strict moderation going forward.
I grew up in Dubai and most of my teachers were women. None of the boys ever gave any lip on account of their sex. If they did, the teacher wouldn’t need to discipline them… we would.
There was always a large number of stupid kids who were jerks in school, but it was always hidden behind a mentality of stern rebukes of fights and an occasional suspension. Now, all of those same types of moronic assholes have a digital distillated stream of garbage that fits with their natural tendancies, putting these idiots into hyperdrive.
Honestly, it’s probably better that the problem gets worse so that it unmasks the high amount of bullying and abuse that’s normally accepted in schools.
Worst of all, when bullies harass and attack and beat people over and over in school, on the rare occasion when a student defends themself, the defender often ends up charged because “cool” bullies get a free pass unless bones are broken or the victim dies, while uncool victims are castigated by schools for defending themselves. The unfortunate recent charging of the innocent Karmelo Anthony with murder for refusing to be bullied by some asshole jock is an excellent example of this.
Andrew Tate is not the problem, this problem has existed for a long time with school just letting it fester. Tate at least finally makes the problem noticeable. The problem has always been school administrators who allow this sort of stuff to happen.
Send them to a Catholic male-only school, which incidentally is also one of the most right-wing places I can imagine. Let’s see how long they remain up to their “masculine” standards.
Abuse isn’t the solution to miseducation.
I am just saying that they don’t know what they are asking for with this behavior: such places already exist and they are abusive to their own members.
Have you ever had a creepy guy who hangs around the school desperately trying to impress little kids? Yeah he’s the online version.
Or he’s your friend’s weird, 28 year old brother, whose room is only lit with black lights, and UV reactive posters, has no job, smokes weed all day, and trips all the time, who tells you Mayans invented cell phones.
Due these Andrew Tate fans happen to come from a country that devalues women?
I’ve seen them not wanting to work with women due to some religious fundamentalism.
I don’t think it is social media. It is much more simple: people can’t spend time with each other. Employers keep reducing the wages, while maintaining or increasing the amount of work their employees have to do. This means that workers can’t invest time into friends or family, which in turn deprives children of healthy role models.
Jackasses like Tate get to influence the children, because there is a void that has been left empty - Tate has enough wealth and time to fill in for society. Work culture is a ravenous beast, forever chasing workers. If you pause, you lose everything. So you might as well sacrifice the time you could spend with family, since you would lose them anyway if you shirk being a breadwinner.
Optimization for the sake of line going up, inevitably destroys everything that surrounds the pillar that society is forced to worship.
I would argue that those factors aren’t a direct cause, but the isolation leaves them vulnerable to things like this. The internet used to be wide open and your semi-random traversal of independent sites would still expose you to a diverse array of people and content.
The pursuit of profit led to massive, accessible, engagement driven social media platforms. Optimization for ad views meant segmenting demographics and serving them distilled content. The hyper specific content led to these demographics living in echo chambers based on their flavor of polarizing content.
The Tate-sphere is built around exploiting that isolation and selling bogus solutions. There’s no specific reason the algorithm funnels into it other than it’s catches a broad user base on a charged topic => $$$. The algorithm could just as easily push young men into fighting for socially beneficial causes, but anger is a strong emotion that gives the most money.
It’s not either or. It could be both. In rhis case, most of these reasons can be traced back to the perversion of capitalism.
I would also include the death of the “third place”. Because even if you work enough to survive, where do you spend your time outside of the home with other people in your community without spending money? Even worse options if you want kids allowed.
One of the only places I know of is the library. But I’d be very surprised by an 8-10 year old boy spending their time at the library.
Jackasses like Tate get to influence the children, because there is a void that has been left empty
I’d like to amend this to say that there is void that support “boys”. There’s a lot of encouragement for the development of girls into STEM, into sports, into everything else but there’s no encouragement for boys. Boys are left to fend for themselves and if they don’t get the right support and encouragement at home, they end up ripe for influencers like Tate.
A lot of them spend their free time in their bedrooms, gaming. Their only friends are online gamers that are in other parts of the world. They have no actual physical interaction.
I’ve even seen posts where young men in their 20s are finally making enough money that they can finally visit online friends that they’ve known for years, often describing them as “best friends.”
It’s interesting my friends kid is 13. A couple of years ago they were able to take a trip across country to visit their online friends that they spend all their time with in games. Those kids are all girls. This life style truly isn’t exclusive to one gender. The father works a 9-5 and the mother is a stay at home mom with some side hustles for extra cash. Their kid seems to be kind but who knows what she is really getting into online. This world is like a caricature of itself.
I’m glad that people can’t hide behind a face anymore. In the old times, and this still happens in some places, people will get away with abuse because they’re good at using their faces to manipulate people. Preachers, community leaders. They used body language to win people’s trust and gain positions of power to abuse people, especially children.
On the internet, people have to be more honest. Video chat is unpopular, so most people are only using words to communicate. Sometimes voice. You’re looking straight at someone’s soul with less distraction from the physical plane. It’s safer.
I wouldn’t trust a guy who I’ve only ever met in the flesh. Ugh, creepy.
On the internet, people have to be more honest.
I… don’t think that’s how it works lol.
Yall didn’t see this coming with the red pill derived slang that kids have been using? They’re obsessed with their value. It’s terrifying and capitalism loves it.
I’m clueless, what slang are we talking about here, I doubt I’d know it if I heard it.
Rizz, alpha/beta/sigma, mid, simp. A lot of importance placed on your value, your masculinity and a lot of overlap between gaming and red pill content.
You got kids mewing trying to get their jawlines looking nice. Little girls obsessed with makeup and skincare. It’s wild and people think it’s all innocent. It’s not. It’s early indoctrination.
I don’t know much more than you, but they said it right in the comment. “They are obsessed with their value” Such as, “High value man” “low value man” ect
I do know my 14 year old nephew is obsessed with making money in ways I never saw in my youth cohort
Nothing is more toxic than obsessing over money and status. Literally will poison your soul and ruin your life.
Welcome to capitalism baby!
Capitalism is an inadequate reason for all this, because we had decades of capitalism without this level of shit and toxicity.
“How did we get here from there?” One step at a time.
Not all consequences are immediate.
I don’t really see this as something new. None of it really. There have always been backward ass people. They have always called other kids losers and ostracized them. There has always been a classroom full of kids dragging everyone around them down. School never solved these problems so how am I supposed to react when I hear it’s getting worse?
It’s from the Matrix, maybe you’ve seen it. For those who haven’t here it is without giving any major spoilers: at one point one of the main characters tells the protagonist that if he wants to learn the truth he could take a red pill that he offers to him, but if he wants to remain oblivious and continue to live normally he should take a blue pill. They’re using this analogy to describe how the media peddles as normal what they consider wrong values and ideas like lgbtq tolerance, feminism and so on.
Needless to say, Tate is a big fan of that movie. So much so that he named his “course” the Matrix Academy. One of my former classmates actually paid for that nonsense. It was just a discord server and the lectures were useless. All the information there could be found for free on the internet by just doing a Google search or watching a few videos on Youtube.
When I was a kid in the 80s & 90s that’s when the parents get brought in.
Watch the series Adolescence (Netflix)
Next to the fact that every. Hour long. Episode. Is a one-take, it shows that this phenomenon is real. It is based on a true story and I won’t spoil anything, but it gets dark from the second it starts.
why periods in weird places?
Unlike the reference series, the comment was not done in 1 take and didn’t have the budget for professional editing.
It was a toilet comment. I can only take so long before people notice I’m gone.
Just read it out loud (even in your head) and you’ll notice it’s adding pauses for emphasis. Whether it’s good style or not is a different question, but the why seems pretty clear.
Either a 3rd grade drop out, or someone too old to remember what they learned in 3rd grade.
The series is addressed in the article
