37-Year-Old Mom Spent Seven Days Online as an 11-Year-Old Girl

On the latter, I keep having the thought that in 2019, that comment should not be needed. I feel the same about your comment and how men act.

(I say all this as a older white man.)

ps: my story is very slightly related to the thread and your example as I was not a minor nor made a minor female profile. Strangers annoying young girls should be stopped immediately.

This is generally true in both directions. While I have never experienced sexual harassment, I do experience nothing. As in, no woman (online) initiates contact with me. Every woman apparently initiating contact is a scammer and likely not actually a woman.

Definitely. It's hard to fathom pretty much any "deluge of interactions" and their destructiveness at scale without having going through.

An other common case is online pileups e.g. a random tweet gets retweeted and is controversial enough that people now viewing it want to reply. For them it's just a reply, for the rando it's thousands of by and large useless repetitive and unoriginal message.

It's fundamentally a DDOS, and the skeeviness or even maliciousness of the interactions you experienced only serve to make things workse.

She looked to the construction workers and seemed baffled. She told me she was she was surprised that they were 'NOT' catcalling her with me walking with her.

That opened my eyes a bit. She had walked by them before several times and they had harassed her many times, from across the street.

She was either 16 or 17 at the time. I am pretty sure she was not 18 at the time. The age of consent in California.

On the other hand, the kind of existential dread many men experience now is something only modern society really made an opportunity to foster. Depression, loneliness, and feelings of abject hopelessness can eat you from the inside out. You feel anxiety as if there's a tiger outside but there is no tiger, you can never "escape" the tiger until you find a partner (and even then your past life can have a permanent lasting effect on you), and being clocked as experiencing all of this makes you "desperate" and less attractive creating a vicious cycle of misery.

If I could have chosen I'd rather have been born onto the other side of that experience instead of barely being able to enjoy life up until recently. Manageable specific threats presenting themselves throughout the day that go away when I remove myself from a situation (or mace them or something) instead of going through the motions day in day out feeling increasingly worthless with every failed attempt at reaching out to a potential partner, online or offline. Having too many options presenting themselves to you versus knowing that at least 500 people in a row online deemed you not even worth responding to.

There is a stats model as to why this is. I can't find the reference, so my recollection may be spotty.

Essentially, assume there are more men than women in some room. Assume that some percent of either sex will espouse sexist comments at the other sex. Running through the math, you find that women hear more sexist comments than men do. If you plug in some real world numbers (of sex imbalances, sexist remark frequencies, time in various environments, etc) to these percentages and not just some random ones, then something like 95% of women will get some very crude remarks thrown their way nearly every day. Again, I can't find the reference, but it has it's own eponymously named rule to it on Wikipedia (though it's not on that linking page yet for some reason).

Basically, one possible reason men don't hear a lot of very sexist stuff all that time is 'because math'. Men need to listen to their sisters, mothers, wives, friends, and coworkers and believe them more often.

But then, I'm a guy. However, I have been catcalled and propositioned, by gay men. In clubs, at parties, in restrooms, etc. Rarely, though. And sometimes I flirt, just for lulz. Almost got me knifed, one time.

And then there's all the other crap that we all need to deal with from obnoxious guys.

My 12 year daughter, for example, is one of only a few kids in her class that don't have their own phone. And it's been like this for a couple years. Her friends think we're dragons for restricting her and her brother to 1 hour a day. Throughout the school day she is getting access to school iPads for 'free time' where it's open season on YouTube and the like.

The ages 11 and up are when parents get a harsh education in just how little 'control' they can (or should?) have over their kids. The best bet is to make sure there's open channels of communication and enough mutual respect that your kids will come to you when confused or upset, and maybe even listen to your advice. Trying to clamp down on them and control their access to the Internet (in an era where most of their peers have almost unfettered access) doesn't encourage that trust. We've learned the hard way.

Homework, from a surprisingly young age, often expects and requires internet use. Personally I would have preferred a reasonable mix of all sources, including using a library, and when and why to choose - the internet often lacks depth, or is wrong, and kids often go through a stage of "it's on the internet, it must be true". I'm not convinced they all get past that, as if they do it's self-learnt. Adults too.

Guided use is for younger than 11 as they'll use the net in class and for homework, as well as socially well before high school these days. You'd better have tried to give them the tools and skills to try and judge, be suspicious etc before then. Considering most people really aren't that tech aware, how is a non-tech parent meant to judge when is the right moment? My peer group isn't even slightly representative as there was a heavy presence of router rules, firewalls, non-admin access and so on. None of which is there the moment they hook up to coffee shop or friend's wifi. So, just like walking to school, best you can do is give them the nudges to fend for themselves, and hopefully know when to yell for help or advice from parent or teacher. (Teach would probably be non techie, and not much use either).

Then you have peer pressure. It's hard to resist too early smartphone or social media use when your kid is the last in class without, and it's their main form of contact. They don't call round houses or phone like we did in my, pre-internet schooldays. Facebook et al say you shouldn't have an account before 13, but there is precisely no enforcement of that. So what to do? As you say children can be quite cruel, often especially to those who don't conform. We judged the right moment was around 12-13 - high school is when kids get properly cruel. We were amongst the last of the very late adopters as far as we can tell...

Critical thinking is one thing that is markedly absent in education, it's far more checking the boxes of giving them a tech education, and schools using "modern stuff", like those mostly pointless interactive whiteboards all the schools got at great expense. No evidence of teaching them to think, to judge, to differentiate between ads and SERPs, or which SERPs might be potentially trustworthy, how to judge a source's credibility, etc, etc. Course critical thinking might have some of them questioning the system... :)

You're not shifting the blame so much as directly blaming the victims and their parents.

About child cruelty, I can remember how mean we could be. And how innocent it was at the same time. It's all a game of loud teasing, we were all calling each other names to make everybody laugh; it's just that sometimes some people get too much and sometimes some people already have too much on their plate. I was as much a victim as a perpetrator.

Because she wants to expeirience and learn society where it happens.

Internet is main space for human interaction. Asking why 11 year old would be on the internet is like asking why would she be in the mall or on the street or anywhere really except home, school and inside of family car.

She should be on the internet and she should be expeiriencing it because that's the only way she can learn to tolerate it and find her way around it. She won't learn it at school or from parents that barely have any clue what's internet outside of their email accounts.

When children access internet you need to keep an eye and explain parts of it you yourself do understand. Same as with TV or people in the streets. You can't ban things till children become adults because you are stealing from them opportunity to learn when learning is easiest for them.

If they have your support internet won't break them.

The great bane of the internet is that it allows the crap voices to be heard much more loudly, too.

No dark web, no Hollywood hacker shit. Just go on social media and pretend to be a pretty underage girl and fish meet barrel. These days you could automate this with a good adversarial neural net (including image generation!) that would engage predators and let them incriminate themselves.

The authorities don't do this because they don't really care. Child abuse is a political dog whistle but it's not a real priority. As with many child care issues there is an unspoken classism at work too: that only happens to the children of less responsible lower class people (which is false).

We shouldn't rule out that they're being substantially misleading, but I don't think we should just assume that either.

The fact that it takes three letter agencies multiple years and inter-country coordination tells me that it isn't quite this simple.

Seemed to me to happen right around when Facebook got popular. When it was college-only a real identity didn't seem that big a deal, since you were linked with people you already kind-of had access to, and anyone who could see who you were you could also see who they were. But then when it went public the dam broke - hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unmasked on the public internet.

This company is training machine learning on grooming language and they could sell that data to companies like Facebook to automatically monitor child accounts-- with their parents' consent. That's a much better solution.

The idea behind the disucssion/story was that pedophilia (the desire) is a condition (like any other we treat; alcoholism, depression, etc). Treating it like that, looking for ways with the urge to avoid hurting people, was a reasonable approach. It was argued that making such fictional items illegal hurt, rather than helped, children; because it took away non-harmful outlets for the desires.

Because we've saturated our society with messages telling them this is how to be popular and successful.

But that's not the scary thing here in the least; the scary thing is how absurdly many of these men are immediately and overtly predatory towards someone they evidently clearly perceive as being a target for manipulation. They contacted her unbidden for the sole purpose of getting sexual gratification out of an individual who they knew was at a disadvantage to them. What are the cultural roots driving this behavior? What does it say about the perception of sex we're engendering in these men that they're so driven to express their sexual will on someone they perceive as vulnerable? These could never constitute a healthy sexual interaction, they are compulsively extractive and impersonal.

I'd argue the real damage that our society does is foster in people an addictive appetite for exploitation and satisfaction through the expression of power over others. No doubt, for these men these young children don't register in their minds as human beings, but as valued objects they can attempt to have control over.

How deeply fucked up are we as a society that hordes of men seek sexual satisfaction through that kind of dynamic? What did we do to them to generate a pathological craving to dominate and feel power?

I'd argue that perhaps this is just what a society based around hierarchies does.

I'm not actually convinced there is any damage.

Dunno, around where I lived, every kid in school knew what sex is by the age of 10-12, boys probably had found porn magazines in the woods, and would've been excited if some older lady with actual boobs sent them nudes through a computer.

I think parents are way more shocked and traumatized than their kids are.

You think this hasn't been tried? These guys are not like you or me, they are severely lacking in empathy. They feel no aversion whatsoever to engaging in predatory behavior on fellow humans, including kids, as a matter of basic temperament. You can prevent them from becoming predators only by providing clear consequences for such behavior, and an appealing alternative for them to choose instead. (The latter is why smart people don't tend to become predators of this sort - they have other ambitions, whatever those might be.)

The fact that there are people preying on children over the internet is disturbing, but I don't find it surprising. I'm not upset in the visceral sense because I can't keep that feeling up for something that has been a matter of fact about the world since time immemorial.

There are an infinite number of things in the world that are troublesome, that don't affect you. You do not want to let it take over your life. I have a friend with severe anxiety and he worries over everything that doesn't involve him or that is inconsequential. He is absolutely miserable because of it. You do not want to be like that.

I'm not that worried either. This issue is already being discussed quite widely, children will get educated, etc.

Naked/sexual images aspect doesn't disturb me much, what disturbs me is the manipulation/secrecy/blackmail aspect, and attempts at real life contact. Both is hopefully preventible with educating children on how to treat the internet, and how to keep their privacy, and how to recognize danger and deal with it. Newer generations of parents will have more clue about this, and will be able to prepare their children for this better.

From what I've heard so far about the issue, and given how widespread this is, I have a theory that children get targeted more, simply because they are more likely to give attention to people giving them some attention and simple adoration.

The way people engage ethical questions is very complex. One way of looking at this is along the emotion vs. logic spectrum. Both strategies work, but have different advantages and require different feedback loops to improve. But it is our collective responsibility to engage those feedback loops as much as possible (which you're doing by your posting, which I think took courage).

On this particular issue it seems you're more towards the logic end. That's fine. If that makes you uncomfortable, that's ok. Dig a little but don't judge yourself - this only hurts the process.

At the end of the day, in the words of Batman: "It's not who you are that defines you, it's what you do."

Edit, for anecdata: I lost a parent to disease early in life, and it took me years to come to terms with the fact that I very rarely feel any emotion about it. Interestingly, I find my reaction changed with age.

That said, I feel anything to do with children being victims much more viscerally now as a parent than I did before.

You want some faceless moderator at Facebook/Google to read all your private messages and look at all your stuff? I don't think you've thought this through.

Edit: Can someone paste the whole article? As a parent of 9 and 7 year old girls, I'd like to know what platforms to be weary of. There's no way we'll be letting them have public social media accounts for a very long time.