I’m sorry if no one’s explained this to you before but a content creator telling you that their work isn’t for minors and it’s not their responsibility to jump through hoops to keep it from you is an adult looking out for kids. they’re modeling good boundaries and setting the expectation that you’ll engage with the online community like a person and take responsibility for your choices. if you cannot understand that you need to look out for yourself and take people seriously when they say their work isn’t suitable for young audiences then you are not ready to be unsupervised on the internet.
Exactly. And I don’t know if it’s been explained this way before but: We don’t stop making food with peanuts because there are humans who are allergic. We accurately label food with peanut contents and manufacturing facilities that handle peanuts so that people can make informed choices for themselves and their allergies or diets.
Tagging, fic ratings, labeling a blog or twitter or discord server as 18+ are letting you know what’s inside. You cannot sue a company because you blindly ate their food without looking at their warning label, and it had peanuts inside and you suffered anaphylaxis shock. They did their part to add a warning label. You have to protect yourself and look for labels, ingredient lists and make an informed decision. You cannot look at the ‘Warning: Contains peanuts” label, then eat the food anyway, and get mad when you suffer an allergic reaction. And many places have banned peanut butter in schools because children cannot handle the responsibility of proper allergy protocols, because they are children, and have to be supervised by trained adults that have accepted the responsibility to guard the children from harm. Your parents or guardians should be educating and supervising you, because they accept the responsibility to keep you safe - NOT random adults on the internet. We do not consent to that responsibility just by existing, by creating or sharing content. That’s not how it works.
You don’t know us, we don’t know you - we keep you safe by posting boundaries, warning labels, tags and assigning a content rating to the content. Everything else is on you or your guardian.
All of this. I grew up with the internet in the 90s, and it was the Wild Wild West out there, especially in fandom. There was a lot of trial and error as I learned how to make my online spaces safe and comfortable. I absolutely crossed comfort lines and lied about my age and circumvented parental controls, because that’s what children and teens DO. They test boundaries. Underage people will find a way to get to content they want to view, one way or another. The only responsibility adult creators have is to tag, label, and rate appropriately in shared spaces so that anyone who encounters it can make their own choices. And the responsibility of parents is to teach their kids good “internet hygiene.” It’s like sex: kids are going to find ways to explore and experiment, so you need to teach them to navigate it as safely as possible. Things like not giving out personal information, not sharing your age/photos publicly, using filters/tags/blacklists, checking sources, spotting potential predatory or grooming behavior…it’s much more effective (and healthy) than just expecting the Rest Of The Internet to police itself for your kids, because it gives them agency over their own online experiences.