#i never sought out tumblr. i looked for characters on pinterest and it brought me here.

[losttranslator]

Another problem that needs to be adressed is that no kid arrives on the internet pre-equipped with the knowledge that they are going to see stuff they'd rather not. No kid starts out knowing what to filter and what to avoid. (Especially kids that don't have English as their first language. I sure as shit didn't know to blacklist 'nsfw' and 'bdsm' when I didn't know what the acronyms meant.) Worse even, kids mostly don't have the understanding of WHY adult stuff is bad for them if they are exposed to it too early, so when they come across it they don't know that it's hurting them.

Like, seriously. What warning signs were there in Fanfiction.net fandom pages as you browsed through story summaries? Sure, you could filter out 'romance' and 'mature,' but as a 12-yo kid, I didn't know what it meant for a story to be tagged as romance (because let's be real, many of the mature ones weren't tagged as mature because it hid them from searches by default and authors didn't want to lose on potential readers) and why I needed to stay away from it. Only purposely seeking out age-appropriate gen stories never stopped me from coming across a whooooooole bunch of EXTREMELY graphic and shocking stuff that I could barely even recognize as scarring at the time. And when I arrived on tumblr at around 14, there was even more stuff I was totally unaware that I should block and avoid, because I didn't even know that stuff existed before I came across it. I didn't blacklist incest until I'd already come across it, because as a kid it doesn't occur to you that people you followed for the fanarts will put incest on your dash.

Individual blogs can be marked as 18+, but you don't see the blog's header when you come across it in a character tag, and the problem of very, very poorly tagged posts being everywhere remains.

The usual response is "it's the sole responsibility of parents to manage their kids' screen time" but that's an increasingly unrealistic expectation in a world where screens are everywhere.

I am NOT saying fandom shouldn't have adult content, btw - I'm saying placing the responsibility of curating their own experiences on kids is just as unreasonable as tone-policing adults and stopping them from having their own spaces. Kids, by the very reality of their limited life experience, are not capable of knowing how to keep themselves safe from dangers they know nothing about.

Just saw someone say something like "proshippers stop inserting yourself into minor filled spaces" (referring to fandom), so daily reminder fandom was never made for or by kids. It has always been predominantly adults.

Kids are welcome in fandom, but they are the ones who must read the signs warning not to enter 18+ spaces