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Girls Online | The Point Magazine

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Even as girls purportedly lose on the internet, a girlish mode of expression and Goffmanian self-presentation have won out among swelling ranks of users—including many who are not themselves girls.

For a fleeting moment in 2021, Senator Richard Blumenthal traded away his blue suit and American-flag lapel pin. The stiff-backed, deep-pocketed Democratic lion of Stamford, Connecticut took to posing instead as… an unsupervised thirteen-year-old searching for dieting tips on Instagram: just another girl online. Recent Facebook leaks had revealed the netherworld of teen girls sacrificed to the platform’s beasts—psychoses, addictions, cruelties. Who would rescue the girls from the algorithms? The senator may have falsely claimed to have done a tour in Vietnam, but now he was facing real danger,

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