> She warned mothers not to make their children social media influencers. “With the wisdom and knowledge I have now, if I could go back, I definitely wouldn’t do it,” she said. “I’ve been stupidly, naïvely, feeding a pack of monsters, and the regret is huge.”

Just wow. Lady you're the fucking monster for prioritizing money over your kid. Seems like we are ready to blame everyone except the moms.

I feel sorry for the kids as they are basically fucked for life. I have zero sympathy for the parents.

Awful people doing awful things. But never before in history have they had the tools to scale and amplify their behavior as they do today.

As we continue to see more and more evidence of the deleterious effects social media has, I keep wondering how the people employed in this industry rationalize their contributions to things like this, and lack of meaningful action in response to it.

Many Meta employees are here on HN. What are your thoughts when you read about how Meta seems ill-equipped and unmotivated to do anything about this? Do you care?

Seems like Meta could just disable mom-run accounts for minors with the flip of a switch and make a positive difference. The fact that they don't speaks volumes.

The rationalizations I've heard boil down to (a) money (b) nowhere else can you work on interesting technology innovations at the scale of Meta (c) if Meta didn't enable this someone else would and (d) idealistically hoping you can effect more positive change from within the beast than outside of it

Is there something else?

> some so enthusiastic about her posts that they pay $9.99 a month for more photos

I have absolutely zero sympathy for someone that decides to sell photos of their 11 year old daughter for a monthly subscription fee of $9.99

you should have sympathy for the child, not the mother

> Kaelyn, whose daughter is now 17, said she worried that a childhood spent sporting bikinis online for adult men had scarred her.

> “She’s written herself off and decided that the only way she’s going to have a future is to make a mint on OnlyFans,” she said,

Wonder if mom gets a percentage from that also.

This is a massive story. It’s hard to conclude that meta isn’t acting deliberately.

> Meta, Instagram’s parent company, found that 500,000 child Instagram accounts had “inappropriate” interactions every day

> the company said it removed two accounts after The Times pointed them out.

pimpin ain’t easy.. until now Thanks Zuck

Allow me to say something rather contraversial, but this sort of thing has been around for a while in the American unconscious (in an interview somewhere, Nabakov says he wrote Lolita in part to make Americans uncomfortable), and Instagram and the NYT has just brought it into the forefront of the collective psyche.

We have to understand that our concept of pedophilia and childhood sexuality is very recent, and though sexual attraction to young girls in the 18th century and earlier in Europe was considered strange, it wasn't a crime, and the average marriage age of women around the world was still 14. As capitalism developed, that age continued to increase, until today when woman in advanced capitalist economies aren't expected to marry until their late 20s, and the late 20s is the age when we consider someone to be a fully mature adult, though we say that 16 or so--around there on average--is old enough to make decisions about ones own sexuality.

I am not an advocate for removing the age of consent or any radical policies that would resemble those that came out of western Europe in the late 60s, but merely pointing out that the entire moral component of the issue is deeply intertwined with contemporary history, and we can't forget that when examining the impact of technology on society.

> it wasn't a crime, and the average marriage age of women around the world was still 14

That’s just as outright false as it gets. Average marriage age was never that low going back to the middle ages (ancient Rome/Greece were different). Of course it varied a lot. e.g in Northwestern Europe back in the 13-14th centuries (specifically in Britain, although IIRC Northern France wasn’t that different)it was the most common for women to marry somewhere between 18-22 while in Italy 16-18 was more usual (which is why I assume Romeo and Juliet made any sense to English audiences).

A few centuries later mid 20s became a lot more common in Britain (and I think in the US). In fact the average marriage age in the 1960s was lower than it had ever been in centuries:

http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/Age.htm

Europe is a special case, the average age in, e.g. China may be lower, though maybe not 14.

The concept of the Germ Theory of Disease is also relatively recent. Just because paedophilia and paederasty have been practised since time immemorial doesn't make them good.

Regardless of what may have happened historically (and your claims are dubious, as others have pointed out), it really doesn’t make sense to suggest that the average person is capable of the degree of consent necessary for a long term relationship in their teens.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that we begin to develop a sense of sexuality and gender identity in our teenage or even preteen years, and to foster acceptance of that identity. It’s another matter entirely to suggest that this identity coincides with maturity and ability to consent. At that age, we’re still developing our sense of self and don’t fully understand the various components of intimacy, including consent.

It’s the difference between sex-positivity and sexualization. For whatever reason, our society seems to have a hard time understanding the difference beyond a few well-established scenarios. We understand that it’s healthy for parents to discuss sex and gender with their children: “use a condom,” “understand and respect that others may have different preferences than you, and that’s okay—likewise, you don’t need to follow the crowd,” “consent while intoxicated isn’t consent.” We also understand that it’s not healthy for parents to be actively encouraging their teens to get married.

But we seem to have trouble extrapolating that line into technology: is it okay for parents to be running these accounts? Are the children they represent capable of consenting to these images being published? Do we care that some of the consumers of these images are treating them as sexual? If there’s a likelihood that the images will be sexualized by some subset of the audience, is that a good reason to avoid posting them, and, if so, where is that line?

The average age of marriage was not 14. That’s a myth.

Also it was mostly false in the west at least. The Average marriage became lower, not higher in the 20th century before it began increasing at a very fast pace in the 70s:

http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/Age.htm

Depending on the area between the 1600s and 1800s it was not uncommon at all for women to marry in her mid-20s. Even in the middle ages in North Western Europe the average age never dipped much below 20

Average life expectancy was highly skewed by the huge number of infant and child deaths from infectious disease and accidents. People who survived to adulthood had a reasonable chance of living to old age, even hundreds or thousands of years ago.

> People grew up faster.

In some ways, without a doubt, but in others, maybe not. There's evidence kids reached puberty later in pre-industrial society. This seems pertinent.

Trying to normalise attraction to underage children is absolutely disgusting. It’s not normal. In any bubble. Not on Instagram, not in tech and not in hackernews. Your facts are wrong BUT even if they were correct, does the fact it was happening in the stone ages make it right? We can list a lot of things that happened it the past we ought not to repeat today

Interesting piece about the rise of influencers

https://blakeir.com/onlyfans-and-the-evolution-of-the-influe...

Total non sequitur and snark.

Please elaborate? This is exactly what Debord talks about in context of representation over experience. Can say the same regarding Adorno's culture industry.

This was inevitable