CNN
Good, parents exploiting their children for their own personal gain is not okay
Your children are not their belongings, they are their own independent person and your job is to help them in life and prepare them
If I recall correctly the Coogan law was made for this reason specifically for child actors
It’s really annoying to have called this out decades ago, to have been talked down to, only to watch your exact prediction come true.
The rise of AI feels really similar. People rushing ahead, fingers in their ears.
One day I hope my daughter will thank me for protecting her from social media. She’s 16 now and you can’t find anything about her on th web because of me. I didn’t even give her schools permission to use her to image for anything.
Privacy is important to a healthy mind.
When my daughter was younger, she’d watch this channel that was approved for YouTube Kids called HobbyKidsTV where the parents were exploiting (I think) three kids with a fourth to come for YouTube income. And it worked. They had millions of views. I got my daughter back then to stop watching when I pointed out that they gave their kids nicknames and what they named one of them. One was “HobbyFrog.” However, there was an overweight kid (only a little bit) they called “HobbyPig.” Even at 5 or 6 when she watched it, she realized that was just a shitty way to talk about your kid.
On top of that, they did toy unboxing videos virtually daily. You could tell that toys were just not special for those kids anymore and that the parents were just making them do it.
Wow. Calling your own child pig in front of millions of people.
It was so disgusting. And they made so much money.
When social media got big and seemingly every parent out there needed to post publicly every single event/picture/milestone for their kids online, it felt weird. 20 years prior, no parent would willingly share personal information like that to strangers, but suddenly parents couldn’t help themselves.
It struck me that kids would have a very public accounting of their whole life, childhood and on, in a way that I didn’t, and it probably wouldn’t be a good thing.
When I was a kid, my parents took photos, but they were just for the family. And they were usually only on special occasions and holidays. When I was a teenager, my parents took secret photos of me and the others to post on Facebook without our knowledge.
Now that I’m an adult, my parents aren’t allowed to see me at all. I hope those Facebook photos are worth more to them than a relationship with their kids.
I just can’t understand why they wouldn’t post private. We document things like birthdays and family trips on Facebook, but only to immediate friends and with no visibility to even friends of friends.
Also, I refuse to friend anyone I don’t actually have a personal relationship with. My wife is friends with most of her office, and that’s a big fucking nope from me.
I just can’t understand why they wouldn’t post private
Do they know any better? Facebook users don’t strike me as the most technically savvy.
There’s also no such thing as posting private. Meta and all of its partners, affiliates, and advertisers are always in the room.
Agreed. I’ll just leave this link here to make it easier for anyone still on the fence:
There’s no such thing as posting private. Meta and all of its partners, affiliates, and advertisers are always in the room.
Yeah, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not really that interesting at that level. Or possibly at any level.
Note: this is not saying it’s fine as long as you don’t do anything wrong. I’ve done some shit and I know they could know, but they don’t give a fuck so I feel safely anonymous, but that doesn’t mean I’m cool that they could know if they ever decided to care. Fuck, this is longer than my actual fucking joke.
You should watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix. It’s a very accessible explanation of how social media works by creating psychographic profiles to maximize engagement. It’s written and narrated by experts in their respective fields, many of whom created the systems that are now standard. It’s legitimately scary stuff. They’ve been using psychographic profile systems since 2010, so they’ve only gotten more advanced with time.
I will check it out. I’m already somewhat anti-personal-social-media. Lemmy and formerly Reddit where I can just say and be whoever I want with basically no identity is a different case. I get creeped out and stop posting any time I gain any sort of actual following, including abandoning Reddit identities every few years and starting fresh. I’m basically shit at social media, is what I’m saying, but I don’t care because I hate it, but also I need upvotes - PLEASE LOVE ME!
Anyway, yeah man, I’ll check it out. That actually does sound like something I would have interesting nightmares about.
Sorry if my humor missed, but fuck it, you don’t know me.
My wife is friends with most of her office, and that’s a big fucking nope from me.
Isn’t that what LinkedIn is for?
I’m not big on social media, but I have a pretty firm separation between Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts.
When your boss does something like friend you on Facebook, what the fuck are you supposed to do? Tell them no and get on their bad side?
Thankfully I’ve never run into that. But I think I’ve only made about two comments in the last five years and haven’t made a post in probably fifteen years.
I ignore the request and if they say something about it I just tell them I basically never go on it. Anything I post is private so from the outside it looks like an abandoned account. I hope.
Hopefully they never hear you talk about something you read while there.
In my case that’s not a problem, but I can see where that could be an issue.
It’s definitely a quandary some people can be put in. “Do I friend my boss on Facebook and watch what I say on Facebook or do I pretend I don’t use Facebook and never accept and watch what I say so they don’t know I use it or do I turn them down and tell them I don’t want to friend them on Facebook?”
You’d think, but the lines are blurred all the time for some. No matter how chummy I am with someone at work, I really don’t want to be one angry post away from an HR incident.
People do this even today, too. I’ve somehow started getting videos of babies and toddlers recommended to me (I’m guessing various algorithms thinks it’s time for me to graduate from dogs and cats), and yeah, it’s cute as hell, but it would’ve still been cute had you not shared it and kept it private.
