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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 31 2018, @11:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the smells-like-teen-spirit-Nirvana dept.

Very fine Article at The Atlantic. Remember, think of the children, and comment responsibly.

It's harder and harder to have an honest debate on the internet. Social-media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook Groups are rife with trolls; forums are plagued by archaic layouts and spambots. Teenagers who are looking to talk about big issues face additional frustrations, like the fact that most adults on these platforms don't take them seriously.

Naturally, they've turned to Instagram. Specifically, they've turned to "flop" accounts—pages that are collectively managed by several teens, many of them devoted to discussions of hot-button topics: gun control, abortion, immigration, President Donald Trump, LGBTQ issues, YouTubers, breaking news, viral memes.

Just when I get a Facebook account, they have all moved!

The accounts post photos, videos, and screenshots of articles, memes, things, and people considered a "flop," or, essentially, a fail. A flop could be a famous YouTuber saying something racist, someone being rude or awful in person, a homophobic comment, or anything that the teen who posted it deems wrong or unacceptable. Some of the teens who run a given account know one another in real life; more likely, they met online.

Uh-oh, I am starting to suspect something.

"Flop accounts bring attention to bad things or bad people that people should be aware of. We also post cringeworthy content for entertainment purposes," said Alma, a 13-year-old admin on the flop account @nonstopflops.

According to teens, flop accounts began as a way to make fun of celebrities and popular YouTubers, but sometime over the past year they've morphed into something more substantive: a crucial way to share and discuss opinions online.

"Content [on flop accounts] is centralized around things that we think are factually or morally wrong, and it's how we critique them," said Taylor, a 15-year-old in Illinois who is an admin on a flop account. "Today, for instance, I posted a flop that was this lady making fun of someone for being homeless. That's a horrible thing to do."

Kids! Huh! What do they know?

The main thing teens who engage with flop accounts share is a strong distrust of the news media. Teens said they turned to flop accounts specifically because they didn't believe what they read in the news, saw on TV, or even were taught in their U.S.-history class, since, as one teen saw it, their teacher is just one person giving an opinion. Teen flop-account admins and followers said they found information on flop accounts to be far more reliable because it could be crowdsourced and debated.

Wow. Well. We just wait for the next generation, eh? Worked before. The barbarians actually cleaned up nicely.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:48AM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:48AM (#715468) Journal

    Whoever modded that off-topic is wrong (I intentionally counter-modded.) This is specifically relevant to externalized comment systems of a sort springing up in weird-ass places like Instagram. One of the reasons that's happening is because they're being choked off in the appropriate places.

    Media sites that don't allow comments are pure echo chambers, and that's a bad thing no matter whose side you're on, if any, what age you are, where your loyalties and convictions lie, etc. It's one of the defining bits of top-down manipulation out there that sites have begun locking out commenters. All you can learn from such a site is:

    • What the advertisers will put up with
    • What the publisher will allow
    • What the editor will allow and what their spin is
    • What the reporter decides to cover and what their spin is
    • ...and in all of that, there's the dead silence about the stuff they don't cover.

    Oh hey, baby (kids) down a well (cave)! Squirrel!

    Sure, I'm usually pretty far over on one side or the other, and would tell you that the other side is usually being unreasonable or worse, but the thing is, I could tell you - unless comments are locked out. You can't argue with the POV or choices made in re the article when it's out of line, either. It just sits there, uncontested, bewildering and misleading the gullible, of which there are a large number out there (and who could definitely benefit from other POVs... if there were any. But no. Comments not provided, or "Closed" after N selections by a "moderator.")

    Think about the consequences for dissemination of news and information. Carefully.

    Me, I won't support a site that doesn't allow comments, or closes them after N moderator selections. They'll never get a penny out of me, not from a subscription, not from clicking on an ad, not from anything.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=4
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @10:36AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @10:36AM (#715587)

    This is specifically relevant to externalized comment systems of a sort springing up in weird-ass places like Instagram.

    Instagram is not a weird-ass place. It is owned by Facebook.

    What they've got currently is the equivalent of issue 1 of the unofficial student-penned school magazine; issue 2 is going to be so heavily bowdlerized it will be faker than fake news, and most of the kids reading it won't even know.

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday August 01 2018, @02:05PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday August 01 2018, @02:05PM (#715662) Journal

      Instagram is not a weird-ass place. It is owned by Facebook.

      It's about context: Instagram is a weird-ass place for comment undertakings. It's fine for what it was designed to do, which isn't much; it's basically aimed only at users posting images and videos with their phones. You can fool it into working on a desktop machine by changing the user-agent on your browser so Instagram thinks it's a phone, but that's beyond most users ken, even on Chrome, where it's relatively easy to do — but still opaque.

      Facebook is something else entirely, ownership or not.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:11PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday August 01 2018, @12:11PM (#715617)

    Media sites that don't allow comments are pure echo chambers,

    That's the old model - mass printing of stories distributed nationwide, with a potential "letter to the editor" feedback section delayed by weeks or months and receiving a miniscule fraction of the paper / placement. Television broadcasts with similar 1% opportunity for opposing viewpoints presented in a basically mocking fashion.

    Ever notice how the comments section on the internet tends to be much larger than the story itself? Not all comments are clearly focused discussion of the topic, but for a "hot" story, there can be more relevant content in the comments than in the story.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]