The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments.
> At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in.
I can see the allure of a little extra cash and free stuff and attention, but this is just bad parenting.
This is the problem. This woman just "sold" her daughter for money.
I'm sorry, but Meta knows why "adult-run minor accounts" make them revenue. Fucking disgusting. I'd love to see some discovery on their internal metrics and how they build out that feature to drive up engagement from these horny creeps.
And in the process learned that running a business involves more than just something akin to printing cash.
But that’s a lot of time for her to pursue a side gig that does not require putting your child at completely unnecessary risk.
I'm not sure if there is a "solution" to this problem, or its just the case that sexual morality as it has been conceived is already gone, and articles like these are just the death knells of a fallen order. The solution to changing sexual mores is always to socially isolate kids so they don't get "exposed." But you'd figure that, eventually, the kids will think we're all being a bit ridiculous.
Get help.
Also I'm sure we have plenty data that sex can be traumatic even for grown women in consensual relationship. Sex is very strong experience. And your penis is not some holy grail all people want.
So, really, pretty laughably not comparable. And to directly answer your question, the answer is duh, no.
I'm sure you're equally upset about young kids being put in beauty pageants or the countless (Republican) states that have recently defended child marriage. Right? Right?
Must all moral decisions be based on data? If so, what level of certainty is required of this data? In this hypothetically permissive world, is a 13 year the same as an 18 year-old? Because in my experience, their capacities to reason through difficult choices are entirely different. And what makes a 13 year-old substantively different from a 12 year-old? Clearly by limiting your hypothetical to teens, you’re saying something about their capacity to make fully reasoned choices in a way that differs from younger peers. Is there data there? Are these properties evenly distributed in the population? As a parent of a teen, I’m fine if there’s no data here; and I’m ok that it’s a moral choice that the culture in which I live makes based on a deeply held duty to protect, even if the harms aren’t fully understood. Because power differentials may create the illusion of consent, when it’s not truly fully given.
YES
Becoming involved in sexual relationships early makes someone mean/cruel later in life. It also makes them more manipulative. Both are bad for society.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are examples of people who got involved sex too early, and we know how they treat people.
Imagine the nastiest attorney you know. I bet he/she was getting laid in junior high.
OTOH, helping children keep their innocence leads to kind and caring adults.
The article is about a mother profiting from suggestive photos of her child.
> But you'd figure that, eventually, the kids will think we're all being a bit ridiculous.
Do you mean growing up?
No.
Start prosecuting and jailing some execs at Meta and let's see how fast they can fix "the algorithm."
I don't think there is a sane way to prevent missuse of pictures of children.
But a starter would be to not use social media.
The enshittification have been slowly creeping onto the users but I think people have started to slowly realize this.
Facebook proper is a ghost town among my friends. Most women seem to be hooked on Instagram though.
Literally 90% or more of the viewers are just there to look at half-naked bodies. Exactly what the article is talking about.
I don't think anyone could pretend that "I just run a fashion channel" or "I just post videos from my kids gymnastics sessions" doesn't know who's really putting views on their videos. It should be blatantly clear to anyone, especially the creator who has more in-depth tools to monitor their audience. These people 100% know what they're doing and they're willing to keep going.
> The mom and daughter have been debating how to proceed. They offer some subscription content on another platform, but the majority of their followers were on Instagram.
This was the most eyebrow-raising out of an entire article of eyebrow-raising, questionable decisions made by that parent. WHICH other platform?
Don't put your kids on the Internet!
> At one point, she offered Instagram subscriptions to users willing to pay a monthly fee for extra photos and videos.
How more obvious can it be?
This article is clearly the result of trying to justify selling your daughter as a porn star. They'll take the money, but oh how they wish it didn't have to be like this (it doesn't, but I guess the alternatives involve actually working to do something useful).
That's unfair. There are young female chess influencers such as the Botez sisters and Anna Cramling, where I'd guess that the vast majority of the audience is male. Those women are not porn stars, even though their viewership is boosted by their youth and good looks.
There's basically a whole category of porn which is "not explicitly porn". I guess this scratches the male itch for "she doesn't do this for anyone else". YouTube etc is full of channels like this.
You just have to ask yourself, would I be watching, and would the viewership be anywhere near this large, if it was presented by a nerdy, spotty teenage boy? No? Then it's porn.
Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms, Stalked by Men (nytimes.com) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/instagram-child-influe...
3 months ago | 23 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39476721
This, like every other problem with pervasive brainrot technology, and hell good old fashioned ways to shut a brain off, will be talked about for years. Nothing will be done. Things in 10 years will feel normal and be unimaginable now. Thus is humanity for the 30 years I've been here so far.
Don't. Put. Your. Kids. On. The. Internet. I'd say "don't put unwitting strangers on the internet" too, but it's less targeted unless you're stalking a stranger, and I suspect too many HNers are Instagram users for that to be popular.
Also this is your too-often reminder that child beauty pageants are still popular in many places. Anyone taking attendance at those? Seriously, the status quo and what people are accustomed to biases people's norms in extreme ways and we just never seem to put that in context.
My point being, we have fucking pageants for children to get dolled up and pranced about for adults to watch, and here we are, off to the next horror-porn-horror travesty we all know is likely going to continue slowly getting more and more wack, as the norms shift.
I hate how 99% of the planet has no ability to consider long-term reprocussions of decisions, or worse, are incentivized to self-deluded about them. "Let's appeal to things that work in marketing and put our teenage daughter on the internet". Sounds like a god damn comedy sketch.
I'd like to see Meta execs prosecuted and jailed for allowing this, and exposing the members of Congress taking money from Meta.
In the USA the Overton window for these two aspects of life have very little overlap with the rest of the world. In only a very small number of other places do you see fathers teaching their teenager daughters how to handle guns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIR1vcj4lcE
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/26/madonna-critic...
And yeah, I guess if you don't care about tens of thousands of men perving on your daughter every day, upload away! Good thing men are never incredibly harassing or anything.
There's videos online of me doing stuff that would probably end my father's heartbeat in about 10 seconds. I'm not a prude. I'm someone that wishes people would think instead of playing this surprise Pikachu face constantly.
This general ignorance of long-term consequences, and this behavior of men... Neither are limited to Americans. I mean, I wish, it'd be an easy solution for me to avoid both, but alas.