Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the desire to have Instagram, and others, police their sites to prevent bullying, I also think it's pointless to a large extend.

The head of Instagrams public policy is very correct when she states: Teens are exceptionally creative. Assholes and bullies have always existed, 25 years ago at least you had a respite at home after school, but now social media makes victims available 24-7.

Not to sound defeatist, but I don't think social media can exist while preventing bullying. For the victims it's binary, either they're being bullied or they're not, so social media needs to prevent 100% for bullying and that is not going to happen, people will always find a way to be assholes.

In my mind the effort is misplaced, at least for teenagers who often know the bully. It's the schools and parents that need to take action, not some random faceless US corporation.

For 100% online bullying... I don't think there's away around that. You can try to reduce the amount, but you won't be able to eliminate it.

I do not agree with your assertion. Bullying is similar to spam and other unwanted messages. You can never get 100% protection, but you can get pretty far.

Things like Whatsapp not giving you a way to prevent you from being added to a group (until very recently) are fixable. Victims could not even prevent themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.

If I translate your post to spam filtering all efforts there are useless and everyone should disable their spam filters, because either you receive spam or you don't.

>Victims could not even prevent themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.

What’s the difference between inviting Jimmy to that group and just messaging him in private asking him to kill himself? Seems like a pointless feature. (Let’s remember that users you’ve blocked could never add you to groups.)

Bullies then figure out how to make new unblocked accounts, stalk you around the internet on other services and spam you there.

I think we need to address bullies directly, figure out their reasoning and help to resolve those issues. Problem is few actually do get addressed long before it's too late.

> stalk you around the internet on other services and spam you there

That's not a good reason for (e.g., Whatsapp) to not put in some frankly minimal effort to prevent this on their platform.

Every barrier we can out in place will result in fewer bullies making it through the funnel. It’s like a marketing funnel in reverse.

>Bullying is similar to spam and other unwanted messages.

It really isn't. You can mentally deal with a spam email or two a day. It only takes one nasty message or post on social media to devastate a kid for a month, so you need 100% perfect protection and you're not going to get that, regardless of how much monitoring, moderating and AI you throw at the problem.

My argument isn't that we shouldn't try to prevent online bullying, but we need to set our goals for success lower than we'd like. If Instagram tries to prevent bullying, we can't complain when they aren't 100% successful, but people will do just that.

You know they don't actually have to stop 100% of it, right? If they could even get like 50%, that could actually change the psychology of bullies to stop being bullies, because they're learning that the behavior isn't going to work for them. If even a small percentage of the millions of users could be "corrected" into being less mean, that seems worth it.

The schools and parents absolutely should take action, but there's a lot that social media sites can do to give people (not just kids) the tools they need to prevent bullying, harassment, threats and other forms of abuse.

> You can try to reduce the amount, but you won't be able to eliminate it.

That's fine. Just because you can't completely solve a problem doesn't mean you shouldn't take steps to mitigate it. Perfect is the enemy of good, etc.

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