Bad Parents Are Using the Snapchat Spider Filter to Terrify Their Kids
Why on earth would any parent who loves their kid want to make them cry
The internet has warped our culture and our minds to the point where parents will purposefully scare their kids, laugh at their distress, and post the videos on social media to spread the mockery far and wide, to friends and strangers alike.
We’re living in a world in which a Snapchat filter, normally as close to innocuous as anything on the internet can be, is being used by parents to torture their toddlers. The Halloween-themed filter in question superimposes digitally rendered 3D spiders on live images of people’s faces.
That’s all fine and good for adults who have the intellectual capacity to understand that the spiders aren’t real and the emotional capacity to, even if they get freaked out for a second, not completely lose their shit. Kids have neither of those, however, and their horrified reactions to seeing creatures studies suggest they innately fear crawling around on their faces are as predictable as they are sad.
This little girl’s face instantly went from beaming to sobbing, and instead of deleting the video in sham her mom posted it to Twitter.
The screams coming out of this kid’s mouth aren’t “I’m being tickled” screams they’re “I’m terrified there’s a spider on my face and I’m going to die” screams.
The mom’s laughter makes this one extra terrible, as she continues to snicker when her daughter cries out in fear.
This mom is even worse, yelling “It’s on you!” and making her already extremely upset daughter thrash in her car seat.
It’s impossible to imagine an argument for this trend being good that goes beyond “It’s harmless and funny,” an argument that happens to be 100 percent wrong. The videos show that it’s not harmless, that it’s actually traumatic as hell, and it’s only funny to people who enjoy tormenting kids, not exactly the kind of people you want deciding what’s funny or not.
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