> Frankie had used a platform called Wattpad, where users can write and share stories. The last piece she read mirrored the method she used to take her own life.
> Wattpad’s biggest problem is that it lacks moderation. The content guidelines state that Wattpad will take down stories including explicit sex, self-harm or graphic violence that aren’t marked as mature, but just a cursory look through the “hot romance” list reveals many stories that violate these guidelines.
The framing of this problem is all sorts of wrong. The internet isn’t cleanable of any and all content that pertains to self-harm or suicide and focussing on this is a red herring. As somebody who has survived a suicide attempt, the problem is that she was suffering from severe mental illness and hopessness in the first place. There are stages to suicidality, it progresses when the severe problems that blight a person’s life are left untreated and peaks when a person decides that it is rational to not want to exist anymore. Self-harm photos aren’t what takes someone over the edge, it is the real problems within someone’s life appearing both unfixable and unavoidable.
If we want to decrease the suicidality that blights many young peoples lives, and we should, we must de-pressurise young lives and take steps to ensure a kinder environment for kids to grow up in. Until we get into the weeds and start to fix the real problems kids face, we will never begin to solve this problem.
The problem here could have been easily fixed by the school’s filtering system blocking Wattpad, but that is not what is being asked for. They want the internet itself to be policed.
While what occurred was tragic, I don’t really want to live in the world that these parents and the many others sharing their views, want to create.
The objective is a web in which every user has a digital ID for age-verification reasons, but meaning their every interaction can be monitored and tracked. And every website would need to screen content PRIOR to publication in order to remove anything which may be offensive to *somebody*.
Aside from the powers such measures hand to an authoritarian government, perhaps more than enough power to seduce *many* governments into authoritarianism, personally I don’t want everything I do to be trackable by anyone, because if the information exists, it can be hacked and that means every online detail of everyone’s lives can potentially be made public.
And at the very least, companies would be likely to moderate anything that came anywhere near prohibited content to be on the safe side. Like YT where fair usage has gone out the window, we’d see valuable content disappear across the whole internet.
Take it they want soaps banned ? Due to them regularly dealing with self harming storylines. Suicide, rape, abuse, murder, etc ? No ? Just the internet ? Aye good luck with that. You can’t sanitise the internet look at pirate bay for example they have tried to shut it down for years. If one is taken down the next one will instantly be there.
4 comments
> Frankie had used a platform called Wattpad, where users can write and share stories. The last piece she read mirrored the method she used to take her own life.
There’s an opinion piece about Wattpad here and [its lack of moderation](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/23/opinion-wattpad-is-flooded-with-trashy-young-adult-fiction/).
> Wattpad’s biggest problem is that it lacks moderation. The content guidelines state that Wattpad will take down stories including explicit sex, self-harm or graphic violence that aren’t marked as mature, but just a cursory look through the “hot romance” list reveals many stories that violate these guidelines.
The framing of this problem is all sorts of wrong. The internet isn’t cleanable of any and all content that pertains to self-harm or suicide and focussing on this is a red herring. As somebody who has survived a suicide attempt, the problem is that she was suffering from severe mental illness and hopessness in the first place. There are stages to suicidality, it progresses when the severe problems that blight a person’s life are left untreated and peaks when a person decides that it is rational to not want to exist anymore. Self-harm photos aren’t what takes someone over the edge, it is the real problems within someone’s life appearing both unfixable and unavoidable.
If we want to decrease the suicidality that blights many young peoples lives, and we should, we must de-pressurise young lives and take steps to ensure a kinder environment for kids to grow up in. Until we get into the weeds and start to fix the real problems kids face, we will never begin to solve this problem.
The problem here could have been easily fixed by the school’s filtering system blocking Wattpad, but that is not what is being asked for. They want the internet itself to be policed.
While what occurred was tragic, I don’t really want to live in the world that these parents and the many others sharing their views, want to create.
The objective is a web in which every user has a digital ID for age-verification reasons, but meaning their every interaction can be monitored and tracked. And every website would need to screen content PRIOR to publication in order to remove anything which may be offensive to *somebody*.
Aside from the powers such measures hand to an authoritarian government, perhaps more than enough power to seduce *many* governments into authoritarianism, personally I don’t want everything I do to be trackable by anyone, because if the information exists, it can be hacked and that means every online detail of everyone’s lives can potentially be made public.
And at the very least, companies would be likely to moderate anything that came anywhere near prohibited content to be on the safe side. Like YT where fair usage has gone out the window, we’d see valuable content disappear across the whole internet.
Take it they want soaps banned ? Due to them regularly dealing with self harming storylines. Suicide, rape, abuse, murder, etc ? No ? Just the internet ? Aye good luck with that. You can’t sanitise the internet look at pirate bay for example they have tried to shut it down for years. If one is taken down the next one will instantly be there.