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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

> Why are young girls so awful to each other?

Why does this conversation always have to exclusively revolve around how young girls treat each other? Young boys are awful to young girls. Women and men are awful to young girls. The question you should be asking is why do we as a society tolerate people (of any age and any gender!) being so awful to girls?

The article is about Facebook, the company. Facebook isn’t run by young girls. And yet many comments in this thread are focused not on Facebook’s responsibility to (and profiteering from the exploitation of) girls mental health and are instead focused on blaming the girls themselves.

Seems more than a little backwards to me.

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Young girls and young boys (and adults, etc) have peculiar behaviors that differ among groups. Statistically speaking. Of course this isn’t exclusive behaviors among groups, but young girls are more likely to do some things than young boys.

Since this article is talking about young girls, the interest is in behaviors and interventions that would be more impactful for young girls, as a population, than other groups.

It’s not blaming young girls to develop interventions that work to help based on the common characteristics. Nor is it blaming African Americans to study and create specific diabetes interventions to address the specific risks of that subpopulation. It’s not African Americans fault that they have higher diabetes and different characteristics of the disease and they shouldn’t be blamed for this condition. But to help, creating customized interventions will be more effective.

I would think it bad if there were only specialized interventions and no one address other parts of the population.

> Young girls and young boys (and adults, etc) have peculiar behaviors that differ among groups.

But what I’m saying is this behavior isn’t “peculiar“ among these groups at all. It’s the same. Yet we only seem to talk about how it happens amongst young girls and ignore how the behavior is frequently directed towards them as well.

Teenage boys' bullying tends to be physical and a lot less socially adept, stereotypically speaking. Social media is less of an accelerant for that sort of thing.

Sorry about that, I assume everyone is familiar with difference in bullying rates and types by gender. There’s quite a bit of difference on how girls bully and are bullied [0] and there’s lots of statistics and it all seems to echo the same thing.

This was referenced in the article for how Facebook knew it’s stuff affected girls differently than boys.

I’ve read a lot [1] on how social media, in particular, disproportionately negatively impacts girls.

I don’t think we only talk about this, but because it is more significant it comes up more, I think.

Again, I don’t think this is a reason to blame girls or individual girls, since much of the bullying is not caused or targeted to girls. But it affects girls differently.

[0] https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp

[1] https://time.com/5650266/social-media-girls-mental-health/

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