The Daily Dose- Keeping the Kids Safe

This conversation is about Libs of TikTok inspiring violence in order to... save the children? Also discussed: the moral and social obligations of social media platforms, if any.


SOURCE: 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2023/11/02/libs-of-tiktok-tweets-death-bomb-threats/71409213007/

www.thedailyformer.com

Like what you're hearing? Donate here  

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Sam 0:35

what I wanted to bring this conversation to was, libs of TikTok what I find to be interesting is that Libs of TikTok positions itself as looking out for the kids. They're trying to stop indoctrination and keep kids safe. And so they will, post about how, a queer teacher has like the pride flag in their classroom or a trans person exists in a supermarket. And in order to keep the kids safe, These people are calling in bomb threats to an elementary school and I pause when I say all this because I keep trying to understand like, is a dead child better than a potentially gay child? Is that what they're saying? Like, is that the point that's being made here? That like someone's physical and existential safety is less important than making sure That their parents don't need to have a potentially difficult conversation if any of you can help me understand what this is actually about, I would love to know,

Lauren 1:37

That's definitely the way their messaging reads to me, is it's better to have a dead kid than a gay kid or a trans kid. But at the same time, do you really expect them to be honest about that? Probably not. And also, do you expect them to be insightful enough to be able to see it? I doubt it.

Sam 1:52

I just, you don't get to stand there and say we don't want our kids indoctrinated and then indoctrinate them into a type of belief. Like, I do not think it's a benefit to take knowledge away from people. That is, I am just so firmly against that. And like, what are you gonna do if your kid is gay? Or if your kid meets a gay person, you cannot... shield your child from the world existing just because you're weird about it. That makes you the fucking problem, not your child, not the school, not the teachers, I'm so deeply Disgusted by this and every time a book is banned now, i'm buying these books just to make sure that there's access to them.

Lauren 2:40

dare I say this as someone who isn't a parent, but don't have kids if you have expectations like that. Like, when you have a kid, you're basically saying, okay, I'm gonna deal with whatever comes my way. The end.

Sam 2:51

I wish more people thought that and were as loving and human and kind. getting back specifically to Libs of TikTok, like, what do we think the responsibility of these social media accounts like lives of tick tock we've kind of touched on it before with the conversation I had with Andrew Moran's and we've talked about in terms of freedom of speech. But is there a social responsibility that these platforms and publishers need to have at this point? Who should be making these decisions? What the fuck do we do?

Lauren 3:23

Well, take our thing here at Life After Hate, the whole idea is do no harm. that's pretty basic stuff, like, we're pretty mindful of what we do, we talk about it. Even debating on whether stuff should be edited out of these podcasts or not, like, I've seen us do it. So, is there a reason why all these other folks can't take a bit of responsibility for themselves?

Sam 3:42

I mean, I, I find it interesting that the far right wants us to take accountability and responsibility as quote unquote race traitors and turncoats They want gay people to take accountability and to suffer But the far right demands that they are free of any consequence for anything that they do.

Brad 3:58

I think libs of tick tock, whatever. I mean, like, I'm pro freedom of speech. If you want to have some garbage channel that talks about awful shit, I guess have that. But like, you can't throw it in other people's faces when they have that too. When we start saying we can't have a book in a library. We're in a bad space. Like, if we're in a place where we're scared of A guy, dressed up in drag reading a story like what time period is

Sam 4:27

I think you're bringing up something that, like, really hits home for me where it's like, all this information is accessible. Being trans being queer being being black being a woman being someone who doesn't want kids like none of these things are threats. None of these things are existentially a problem to anything. And despite the fact that you can go on the very expensive and very smart computer that you keep in your pocket and Google this and find this out. when the internet first became like a thing, and I was going online all the time, and my mom, a boomer, would always say, Don't believe everything you read on the internet, it's full of lies, and now what do they do? They read headlines on Facebook, and they take it as the word of God, it's just so hard for me to wrap my head around these things. And again, where do we go with X and, and, and Meta and all of these newly renamed, companies that, want to be the free speech wing of the free speech party. But at what cost? Who gets to do these things?

Brad 5:27

Uh, not X, because I think, didn't they fire everybody from there? I think they got rid of most people in their trust and safety department, if I'm not mistaken, and now, the new leader, or whatever, is doing that himself, the edges of some of these platforms are, it's getting to a point where there is like terrible content that's coming up, particularly on X, where it used to be not there, uh, used to not be able to view like actual terrorist content there. Now, there is stuff seeping in like live action violence, stuff like that, the folks that were working so hard at getting that cleaned up on that platform, are now all gone. I mean, I knew some of them myself and, and they're very frustrated they had put six or seven years of hard work in trying to make that platform a safer place. And now it's just kind of slowly going back into that dimension.

Sam 6:21

and the best example I can think of is how like Donald Trump's Twitter account was reinstated to try and encourage him to use it. Andrew Anglin was brought back on. Nick Fuentes, I do think it's really weird where it's like, how did Andrew Anglin get back on and Nick Fuentes get back on and somehow Nick Fuentes was banned in 24 hours, but Anglin is not? it doesn't make sense. Like, the far right wants to talk about a fucking clown world and it's like, yeah, you're living in it.