• Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
    42·
    11 months ago

    I was 12 when I watched my first beheading video.

    I was 13 when I saw a dude get ripped in half by a train.

    I was 14 when I saw a old man opened up his butthole.

    I was 15 when I watched two girls eating shit out of a cup.

    This was before Facebook.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
    301·
    11 months ago

    It’s not just the Internet either. I was at somebody’s house a few months back and their kids aged between 5 through 8 years old were watching a true crime show about a male/female couple who kidnapped and tortured sex slaves in their basement. The show was going into gory details about how the women were tortured, how the kidnappers attempted to cut one of the women’s vocal chords so that they didn’t have to listen to her scream when they tortured her, and accidentally killed her instead. How they put this elaborate torture device over the victim’s heads and squished their faces while hanging the them from the ceiling, and how they repeatedly raped the women. Like what in the absolute fuck? I’m a grown-ass man and it disturbed me. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think little tiny kids should know all the awful shit that happens in the world. Little kids should be playing with My Little Pony and wondering if they can have cookies for dinner.

    • asteriskeverything@lemmy.world
      66·
      11 months ago

      Violence, and violent sex crimes against women, are completely acceptable for children *in American Puritan Media Culture. However yeah even that shocks me, but maybe because you worded it like that and otherwise wouldn’t have picked up on how horrible it is because it’s so normalized.

      ***edited to clarify my point because wow for someone who usually rambles I did NOT give enough information

  • Poggervania@kbin.social
    28·
    11 months ago

    Kind of an odd anecdote, but I remember when bronies were a thing, they legitimately made an entire community effort to scrub all the porn and adult-target content from My Little Pony searches so kids won’t see stuff like the Rainbow Dash cum jar when they look up MLP.

    Kinda wish more internet communities made that kind of effort to clean stuff up so kids aren’t desensitized to horrible stuff early on.

    EDIT: hot damn, the post is still up for those curious about the brony stuff

  • SnuggleSnail@ani.social
    52·
    11 months ago

    The internet has 7 years to clean itself up for my oldest to become 12. Do China and North Korea have this problem? They have other shit going on, but did they at least solve this shit?

      • SnuggleSnail@ani.social
        4·
        11 months ago

        Talking to a kid about the deep terrible natures of mankind, gruesome accidents and gory slaughterings is something I would like to postpone as far as possible.

        • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          11 months ago

          Back in the old days the horrific and protracted public executions held in common squares were a perfect opportunity to bring up “the talk” but alas we’re without such an ice breaker these days.

    • 768@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      11 months ago

      NK might have more structural problems of violence, China probably has both.

      The internet has 7 years to clean itself up for my oldest to become 12.

      I have bad news for you. Realism and Resilience might work better than Mitigation in this case.

      • SnuggleSnail@ani.social
        1·
        11 months ago

        Do you have children?

        Do you have experience with introducing them the gore and excessive violence? I think I need advice from seniors😅

  • 58008@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I remember my friend telling me in 2000 that he saw a video at college of a guy having a knife shoved into his neck. I obviously didn’t believe him, and anyway it sounded kinda tame and I wasn’t sure why he was so disturbed by it. So we spent about 2 hours downloading RealPlayer at my house and then the video clip. Genuine trauma ensued. It’s a now-famous video of a Russian soldier being stabbed in the neck and beheaded by Chechen rebels. Turned out to be one of the lesser atrocities from that war caught on film, but it was my first internet-based trauma. The same friend and I goaded each other into clicking on links on Rotten dot com while chatting on MSN Messenger, to let the other person know how fucked up it was and if it was safe to click on the other person’s end.

    Then Ogrish dot com came along and all manner of horrors became available. Many more Chechen war atrocities, random murders, executions, the latest beheadings from Iraq, you name it they had it. It was during this period in the early to mid 2000s that I developed a thick callous around my brain which let me view those materials without getting PTSD like I did with that first video.

    Occasionally, even that decades-old callous can be penetrated. The creative folks working as chief torturers for the Central and South American drug cartels have really given me a run for my money, in terms of what I can stomach seeing. Every time I thought “well, this has to be the worst thing you can do to a human” they released another video making the previous one look like a merciful death.

    The idea of this sort of stuff being one or two clicks away from children is terrifying. Imagine a 6-year-old watching Funkytown. What manner of therapy would you even deploy in such a scenario? “Yes sweetie, sometimes bad men and women like to peel people like meat-bananas, but don’t worry, that won’t happen to you. Anyway, off to bed with ya!” 😬