a fast and easy way to tell these apps exactly what you think about the fact that they are suppressing palestinian voices as well as anything that supports their cause. apple denied facebook’s request to delete these negative reviews. let’s tank these bitches!
don’t forget facebook messenger and marketplace and whatsapp!!
also update: as of today (may 25, 2021, 4:56 edt) the top reviews for facebook are the one-star callouts!! keep going it’s making a difference!!
Thanks for the addition! U can also add venmo to the list as they restricted money transfer to Palestinians
Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.
Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?
And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.
So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.
But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.
And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.
And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?
And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!
And I was like, and how do you do that?
And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!
And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.
Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.
Well then he should have searched harder!
How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?
He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.
(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)
And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.
Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.
But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.
Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.
(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)
If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.
But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.
Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.
I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.
If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.
I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.
We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.
Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.
It meant “Evil person that hates God” which is why it took me thirty fucking years to realize I was one. Excellent post, OP. I grew up in the middle of freaking nowhere and knew absolutely nothing that wasn’t taught by my parents, my church, or the public school system which had to answer to them both. Educating myself was literally impossible because there was no resources available for me to do so because the Internet did not exist in any sort of useful form until I was in my 20s.
If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.
Thank you for touching on this, too–we have definitely hit the opposite end of the spectrum where information overload is a massive problem.
And we’ve also got to face that active misinformation is not a problem of the past, it’s a problem alive and well in the present.
“Just google it” was viable some years back. It isn’t really so much anymore. Hate groups do a lot of work to make sure they’ll be among the first information you find if you just google it, and somebody just trying to educate themselves may not be able to readily filter out the garbage and parse what’s reliable from what’s propaganda.
And, something people don’t seem to like to accept, part of educating oneself is asking questions of others who have more knowledge. But asking questions out of ignorance is often lumped in with asking out of malice–very understandable, I don’t blame people for this because often malice and ignorance can look very similar or even identical.
But when people do attempt to educate themselves, and the wrong resources are the ones making themselves the most widely available…
Well, that problem with filtering out the garbage and figuring out the reliable sources rears its head once again. That’s not an inherent ability–that’s a learned skill and not everybody learns it young, not everybody finds it easy to learn or to use.
And if a person genuinely doesn’t even know where to begin with searching for information, and is shut out every time they try to ask… Well. They won’t be able to educate themselves very well, if at all, because of that issue with information overload and bad info and difficulty sorting the trash from the truth.
Yes, yes! This has always been a pet peeve of mine - I don’t know if the “not my job to educate you” mentality has died down or if I’ve just culled my feed enough, but as someone who once felt woefully underprepared to navigate difficult topics like race and lgbtq issues, despite growing up in one of the most liberal and well-educated parts of the country, I always felt my heart sink when someone with good intentions was just flung back out into the ocean of the internet to find their own way.
By the time I heard these things, I had been through college and had training in how to do research, but others do not. If your mentality is going to be “it’s up to you to find the most up-to-date, correct information without help because you should just intrinsically know this” then you have to be prepared for people finding and internalizing the wrong information and, here’s the kicker, that will be on you.
No one should be forced to be a dispenser of information, but if you set yourself up as an advocate, you have to realize that comes with the territory. And we can use the community to help us through that! Even just having a form letter-type response with a suggestion of how to get started, or the name of a friend who’s more willing to teach that folks can be redirected to. If we work together we can utilize our strengths and educate without feeling burned out.
Also, pre 2000, being on dial up internet cost quite a lot of money. I got my first flat fee ADSL, was it, somewhere around 2004 or so. Otherwise, free internet? At the library. More likely fee internet.
So if you don’t have a good library (and I was always lucky to have kinda good access to a well stocked one, but I still had to physically travel there which took at last 30 minutes whatever tf I did) then you’d better be a very rich kid buying tons of books and papers and ringing up a very hefty phone bill.
Again, I could get to my country’s national library within 30 minutes and I could even look it up online at home but I’d better explain “what you’re doing on the internet for hours, sweetie, have you seen the bill?”.
Now I am curious about the concept of gender envy but curious enough to spend an hour travelling and another hour looking it up, possibly paying €2 for the privilege and €5 on bus fare? No. I mean, possibly in college, being on campus anyway already, and willing to wait around 20 minutes for free internet. Maybe. But likely not.
At home, for free within 12 seconds? Yeah that changes the game, peeps.
Me: Am I too privileged and spoiled because my dad is willing to help me move halfway across the country and has the financial means to do that even though the expense is kind of a strain on him
Someone else: *becomes a landlord at age 22*
Me: Ah, never mind.
Me: *buys starbucks for myself*
Me: Is this too much?
Someone else: *buys a coffee startup using money they borrowed from their dad*
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
