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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: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @11:46AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @11:46AM (#715600)

    Do you honestly think that a history teacher is actively lying to their students ?

    Lying by omission - yes. There's no way we'd have teenage socialists if they had learned the truth about socialist regimes. This historical illiteracy leads to laughable attempts at conflating the Sandinista with fascism. [huffingtonpost.com] Civics education is the key, if millennials had an exposure to genuine liberal philosophy they wouldn't have strayed so far off the reservation.

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  • (Score: 1, TouchĂ©) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:13PM (#715719)

    Wait until they hear about the horrors of democratic republics! Have you heard of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea?