There should probably be an etiquette rule widely-discussed around here, along the lines of ‘if OP hasn’t blocked you, it would be preferable and polite to reblog their original post and add your thoughts to the discussion there, instead of screenshotting part of the post.’ I’m not saying this to be a wise-ass, it’s just something I believe in, as a matter of courtesy.
As for why I specifically made the ‘18+ across the board’ point? A number of reasons:
yes, most of the ant ringleaders are 20+ adults (looking at you, strange*uthor) but that doesn’t change the fact that they specifically use the presence of minors on a given platform as their most effective and efficient sledgehammer against any sort of adult (or even all-ages) content on that platform that doesn’t match their sensibilities. I’ve been here long enough to see the screeds get more and more extreme, starting from the very reasonable ‘adult content should be flagged, warned-for and put under a read-more’ to the present ‘such content should be policed and sanitized, no matter the warnings and tags’, with the presence of minors being the go-to-argument that allowed ants to push for more and more draconian standards of content-elimination. I’m very aware on a platform that would officially ban underage users they’d just shift tactics, going from a predominant ‘the existence of this content harms minors’ to ‘the existence of this content harms survivors / women / [insert other relevant group here]’, but at the same time I’ve reached such a point of complete and utter fury and frustration with ants and purity culture that I’d take away as many of their weapons as I can.
one particularly effective tactic employed by ants, that I’ve witnessed directly, is the following: they teach one or more of their followers who are minors to go into adult-only spaces on a given social-media platform, make sure to not disclose the fact that they’re minors, wait a bit in there and be exposed to NSFW material. The next step of the plan is for the minor(s) to then publicly and loudly implode, accusing the adult-only space of everything from having directly harmed them to grooming them (my own country defines knowingly showing sexual content to a minor, as an adult, as ‘corruption of minors’ and classifies it as a very serious crime; if someone is able to lie convincingly enough in the above case, they can put a ton of innocent people in a world of hurt). The same tactic can be employed on an 18+ from-the-word-go site, yes, but there’s a bit more protection offered by the fact that the ant-encouraged minor was directly violating the ToS with their actions, instead of just contravening against informal fannish community norms.
I’m dead-serious when I say that Tumblr had a very big problem with what, at least from a legal point of view, was self-posted C/P. I’ve had multiple people confirm to me that significant swathes of cosplay tags in particular were a minefield for adult users, because a significant number of underage people used them in order to post ‘lewd’ photos of themselves in cosplay. Again, that ran the risk of putting a lot of people in danger – the underage users themselves and the adults who stumbled onto the content. At least a chunk of the underage images reportedly not in the FBI database were minors posting their own ‘sexy’ cosplay pictures and, even worse, minors actively engaging in sex-work (camming).
Here’s the problem. In theory, I agree with everything @ace-inclusionist is saying, in regards to the place of minors in fandom. I was a young, isolated queer girl years ago – and fandom was very much my lifeline, the place that actively taught me everything from no longer hating myself for my queerness all the way to how I could recognize IRL abusive partners and how I could safely engage with my kinks, either in a fictional environment or with consenting partners. I was in this same situation.
In practice, however, the greatest problem is that, from a social-attitudes point of view, we’re not living in the same kind of online community I was growing up in, fifteen years ago. It boggles the mind and reads as entirely alien to me – and yet, the truth is that we now exist in online spaces where the slowly-prevailing cultural norm is to be intensely suspicious of adult-minor friendships or even consistent adult-minor social interaction. Let’s not even mention the sort of valuable consent-culture education I was getting as a teen – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me, in so many words, that any adult online offering even the most run-of-the-mill sex-ed to a teen from some fundie family, is a predator. Paradoxically, we’re reached a point where LGBTQ+ elders are now treated as an outright danger by young ‘progressives’, in the same manner we’ve always been treated by social-conservatives.
This wasn’t a widespread problem when I was growing up, but it’s a daily reality now. And a lot of adults are going to reach a point when we decide that, between rabid ants. radfems and everyone else, we’d prefer to legally protect ourselves from some semi-feral neo-puritan trying to destroy our lives by convincing all and sundry that we’re child-abusers purely because of what we ship or because we discuss kinks in a positive way, on a platform where minors are also present.
There’s also an intensely personal aspect to this whole thing. I’m committedly childfree. And I’ve reached such a point of absolute rage against ‘THINK OF ZE CHILDREN!!!’ arguments that I’d give anything to be on a platform where the argument would simply have no legs to stand, on account of who is and isn’t allowed on the platform.
But, because I know what it’s like to feel alone and without any guidance, let’s think up a compromise. I’m open to any and all suggestions. Right now, the best thing I can come up with is a social-media platform with two separate wings, so to speak – an all-ages one, allowing registration of people 13 and up and a secondary, adults-only one, restricted to 18+ users and intended specifically for fannish adult content. On the all-ages version, allow teen-focused sex-ed such as Scarleteen resources and create a teen-focused resource that could be of benefit to LGBTQ+ teens, kink teens, etc, with links to any and all objective information that would allow said teens to be informed and keep themselves and their partners safe.