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The final boss of “learning social skills” is seeing someone online say something about a special interest of yours that’d be the literal perfect opportunity for you to talk about it but deciding not to do it because the person made the comment so long ago it’d be kind of weird to reply now. If you can restrain yourself, you’ll be awarded the “King of Acting Normal” prize on national television by the president. Or so I’m told.

I do not understand this new generation of kids doing the internet equivalent of going into a clearly marked strip club, showing a fake ID to the bouncer and then being shocked and appalled by it being full of adults and strippers.

Well I had this whole paragraphs-long response I added, and you got it in like. A sentence.

like i get this argument, i really do, and there really is only so much content creators can do to try and stop children consuming content not suitable for them

BUT we cannot trust a thirteen year old to have the maturity and foresight to know what is and isn’t good for them. Yeah, their gaurdians should be the ones looking out for them and trying to stop them from getting hurt, but in your library analogy, when the library chooses to have that content it’s also somewhat responsible for restricting access to it - whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something - if you knowingly let unmonitored kids into your buisness, but especially if you encourage them like libraries do, you are responsible for their safety- it takes a village to raise a child and we are all responsible for their safety

that said it’s deffo not the authors responsibility, but the host, tumblr, ao3, where ever. they gotta do something

They literally already are. Rating and tagging everything as mature and clearly marking content is the barrier. This isn’t a movie theater or a library. None of those websites are KNOWINGLY allowing children into their business, because EVERYONE IS INVISIBLE.

There is literally no way to effectively bar children from accessing content they shouldn’t have access to, that doesn’t involve gross invasions of privacy. You can ban all children from a website and that STILL won’t work because there is no actual way to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child. In a lot of cases the bare minimum you can do is just outright ASK if they are a child, but then they LIE and there is no way to STOP them from lying or even figuring out IF they are lying. Hell, not even outright banning all icky things will work, as Tumblr’s disastrous NSFW ban has shown us.

‘We all have a collective responsibility to protect children’ only goes so far. If all children are invisible and can be literally anywhere at any point, ‘collective responsibility’ ends up meaning ‘in your day to day life, you must always act under the assumption that there MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY be a child in the room’. We can’t help raise a child if we literally cannot see them and don’t even have any way of confirming their existence. And it is going too damn far to tell adults they are not allowed to do adult things with other adults because a child MIGHT POTENTIALLY be able to see them do it, even if they’re not supposed to, especially if they’re not supposed to. It’s also going too far to tell all websites that they are responsible for keeping track of legions of invisible, hypothetical, lying children.

All methods of reliably confirming people’s age online are immediately gross and dangerous invasions of privacy. All measures to try and prevent children from seeing things they shouldn’t are flimsy, at best. The MOST EFFECTIVE thing is the thing we are doing already: meticulously tagging and archiving content with extensive filters and multiple warnings, so that every potential viewer can make an informed decision about what they choose to look at.

Which means that, at the end of the day, dumb 13-year-olds and the few people in their lives who can see them as Not Invisible are going to have to take responsibility for themselves, and potentially each other.

Hey so also, just to address part of what lnalovegd said, that thing about libraries being somewhat responsible for restricting access to certain materials…

No, actually.

That is the opposite of what libraries are supposed to do.

Public libraries do not–and CANNOT–restrict materials. At all. You hear every now and again of some that do. It is not a good road to go down. I live in a city with a lot of conservatives (the attempt at a drag queen storytime nearly got the library defunded by a lot). Whose judgement do you use? How do you determine that?

You could say “ratings” but honestly, that’s still not great, since LGBTQ things get rated higher than hetero things. Books don’t really have ratings, and they shouldn’t.

When I worked at the desk of the public library, one thing we HAD to practice was impartiality. It meant handing people hateful books like Anne Coulter’s drek without a side eye. It also meant that if a kid showed up at the desk with a library card and, say… Saw or the Godfather… well. I was going to check it out to them. That’s how public libraries run. Anyone can check out anything, and parental approval is not needed (for us. Parents might have other ideas. I still get mad remembering this woman who wouldn’t let her son check out Calvin & Hobbes or certain other books. But again, I did not say a word. Neutrality).

It’s crucial to a public library that we operate like that.

Libraries do not restrict material. We can organize it. Kids sections, teen sections, adult sections. But no librarian or library tech is going to monitor what children are checking out.

Yeah, kids won’t always know what they’re picking up. The first romance I ever picked up had sex and graphic medieval torture in it. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I stopped reading it. Then when the internet happened…hoo boy, you kids should have seen that wild west.

Comparatively now, I see folks really make every effort to use tags and warnings. Maybe you know what it means, maybe you don’t. But they’re there. They’re the best method we have for keeping content away from people who would be emotionally harmed by it, or who just plain don’t want to see it.

At the end of the day, if you’re old enough to go looking for content on your own, you’re going to have to accept that you might see things you don’t want to see. Yes, even as kids.

There are kid-friendly websites and forums where you can go if you don’t want to deal with that.

The fact that so many people just blithely go ‘oh, well of course libraries restrict what content they’ll allow minors to access and monitor what they check out and notify their guardians if they’re reading something (that the librarian deems) inappropriate’ always makes me want to scream.

Just to add on: a small town in Wisconsin went through this ~10 years ago, when local conservatives tried to get YA books with LGBT content moved to the adult section and labeled “sexually explicit” to try and deter children from accessing them. Librarians refused, and in retaliation the town council refused to renew the contracts of four library board members for supporting them. 

The books stayed where they were.

Librarians do NOT fuck around.

Yeah, I just want to say as someone who works in a library, that it’s absolutely NOT my job to smack books out of kids hands? Sometime last year a 12 year old girl wanted to read YA books and her guardian was down for it so we handed her The Cruel Prince, Children of Blood and Bone, and Eragon (likes fantasy series) and like all of those contain content that I might cringe to give my own 12 year old niece–but dad was okay with it. She decided for herself that she wasn’t about that Cruel Prince vibes and put it down before it got to the sex and “adult man on teen girl” action–which has always been the goal.

Libraries want children and adults to monitor their own consumption of materials, children with the guidance of their parents until they can make that decision for themselves. 

^^^^ This?? does not exist. Especially not the bolded part. There’s actually more monitoring in children’s areas for children’s books that are made for children than there is in the adult section. We barely watch those books and if a 8 year old wants to read The Shining? Holla. Mom signed off on his card, she better be watching. 

This scene here with Matilda could never have happened if Libraries required matilda to have a “rated access” on certain books. Charles Dickens, at the lowest, is usually sorted into YA. Remember, Matilda is going into kindergarten.

I was ten or eleven when I started pulling books off the romance novel shelves. My dad saw, took me aside, and told me the books had some parts that might make me uncomfortable, and if I was uncomfortable, that it was ok to skip a few pages and get back to the story.

He didn’t bar me from reading or censor my chosen content; he gave me the tools to make my own decisions.

When I was ten or eleven, I read all of my dad’s Stephen King and John Grisham books, because they were books and they were in my house and I’d run out of new things to read. 

Were they appropriate for me? No. 

Should my parents have noticed me reading them, and stopped me? Probably!

Is that the fault of anyone outside my house? also no.

The thing is, a couple of years later when I started reading fanfic, I knew, from that experience, that I did not want to read fiction with a lot of violence or explicit sex, so I avoided fic labeled as such and back-buttoned out of a lot of stories as soon as the kissing started.

My 12 year old is a voracious reader. We talk about book series she’s interested in. Sometimes I google the ones I’m not too sure about and sometimes I know them already - but I’ve never outright told her she couldn’t read a specific book or series of books. We talk about the content and why I think it might not be age appropriate (she reads at college level) but she gets to make those decisions for herself.

This year she discovered ao3 (please god don’t let her find me I’d never recover from the embarrassment and neither would she) and we talked about what the ratings and warning tags were about and for. I don’t police her reading but I give her the tools and information to make informed and (I hope) good choices.

As a parent that’s my real job. To provide tools and guidance, not police her content consumption or hide things from her.

Don’t make fandom censorship about “but think of the childrenz” becayse that’s not what it is. It’s not really about children - it’s about virtue signaling.

Parenting is about thinking about the kids; fandom is about making content you enjoy creating and enjoying the content that’s been created. Properly tagged fanfiction is probably safer for kids in that regard than wandering unaccompanied around the library and picking up, for example, Clan of the Cave Bear which triggered me so hard (at 11) that I’ve never fully recovered.

ALSO also?

Every kid is different.

I was reading books WAY above my age level as a kid. And here’s the thing:

Agatha Christie, with all its murder and lying and people having affairs? I loved it. (Still love it.) Mysteries were my lifeblood and I still adore them.

Stephen King, who I now love? I was TERRIFIED of Stephen King. I picked up my first King at 17, and it was because I’d seen a tiny bit of The Tommyknockers as a kid (my mom recorded it to watch at night, I sneaked out of my room, this isn’t on her) and it scared the bejeezus out of me, and I thought reading the book might help. (It did!)

But on a “rating” system, King and Christie would probably be about the same. One was a favorite. One I wouldn’t touch for fear. Another kid might be the exact opposite—just fine with the monsters and horror, but horrified of the murder.

At some point, you have to let the kids decide. You can’t always be there.

The internet isn’t your babysitter. Be responsible for the media you consume.

If something isn’t for you, put it down and walk away.

It’s no one’s problem but yours if you encounter content that upsets you.

The moment you call for restrictions on written media is the moment you have decided to hand authorities too much power over the written word. That never ends well, never.

Here’s a thing I’ve tried to say before, and I’ll try to say again:  I don’t blame kids for wishing that random adults would give them more help controlling their impulses around things that are intriguing-yet-disturbing (which includes, but is not limited to, sexual content).  The problem is mistaking that wish for an actual responsibility on the part of strangers.  

Controlling impulses is the number 1 thing that adolescents are known to be, neurologically, bad at, and when things are working as they should, they would be getting that help, from the adults who actually know and love them.  But there are a lot of parents & other caregivers who have either abdicated that responsibility (sometimes for sympathetic reasons, such as being overwhelmed with other issues, sometimes for shitty ones), or go too far in the other direction and try to block their children from seeing/reading/hearing/watching anything they might have questions about, rather than genuinely helping them to understand their own comfort levels around certain types of content.  

If you’re a teenager and you don’t have anyone you can turn to for help finding content that meets your comfort level, or identifying what should go on your personal No Fly List, or working through your feelings when you inadvertently see something that disturbs you, that sucks.  It’s a shitty situation, and you deserve better.

You do not, however, deserve it from every random stranger on the entire internet.  For all the reasons that have been amply explained upthread, it’s just too big an ask to expect literally everyone else in the world to pick up the slack left by the adults who are actually supposed to looking out for you.  

If creators are tagging accurately, rating appropriately, and using content warnings, they are exercising the maximum level of care for your well-being that is appropriate to the relationship they have with you, a teenager they have never met or interacted with.  

If you see something and think, “Someone should have stopped me from seeing that,” you’re right.  But the person who should have stopped you isn’t the person who wrote or drew it.  That is not the relationship they have with you.  

As an emerging adult, you should be developing the critical thinking skills and emotional awareness to recognize when something’s starting to make you uncomfortable, and the self-confidence to nope out when it does.  If the people who are actually bringing you up aren’t helping you with that–or are actively hindering you from developing those skills–that really, really sucks.  Take a minute to be mad about it–and then start developing those skills on your own.  

(Here’s a free hint:  A main reason that you may have trouble identifying and acting on your own discomfort is if your caregivers send chaotic signals about safety versus danger: exaggerating or inventing dangers in situations that are really safe, or putting you in dangerous situations and acting like it’s normal.  Either one can fuck up your threat-detection system.  You can start to re-calibrate it by consciously checking in with yourself:  how am I feeling right now?  What physical sensations or thoughts accompany this emotion?  Do I want to keep feeling this way?  If not, what activity/aspect of my environment/etc. is contributing to feeling this way?  What will happen if I stop doing the thing/remove the thing from my environment?  Is there a benefit to pushing through my discomfort?  Is there a downside to opting out?  If I decide to push through, is there something I can do to make myself more comfortable?)

[Gif ID/ Matilda from the movie Matilda saying “Lately I’ve been reading Charles Dickens. I could read him every day.” /End ID]

Other people have addressed the whole “can kids work out whats appropriate” bit but I wanna expand on that

Being able to determine what they can handle is a SKILL, not a marker of maturity that will develop regardless when you hit the Correct Age (as im sure we all can see, with the fandom discourse on this site, many adults did not spontaneously develop this). And given the right opportunities, education and support, a child can develop that skill quite early. I can for the most part trust my 10 year old’s judgement, and the rest we discuss together.

For a child to properly develop this skill, you need a few things. A trusted adult that does NOT clutch their pearls at everything, an explanation of WHY said adult may approve or veto some media, and the opportunity for the child to use what they have learnt independently.

See if you just say no all the time and don’t allow a child autonomy, they will intentionally seek out inappropriate media, both because the forbidden is appealing, and because children have a need for autonomy. Which is exactly what I did.

We do not say “no”, at worst we say “not yet”. We research and discuss the media, we both outline what we think is appropriate and inappropriate and why. We discuss if we can mitigate any issues (eg reassurance that the kids survive in jurassic Park, or skipping the sex scene in the expanse). This is important to do even with child friendly media, as that is the easiest and least risky area for a child to practice these skills. And at some point you have to be willing to trust the child. You have to let them take a risk. Its not going to ruin them.

If a 13 year old cannot pick out an appropriate book in a library, then, barring any learning difficulties that makes those skills harder to develop, they have been failed by the adults in their lives, and it is not reasonable to censor society and deprive everyone else of media they want to consume just because some people don’t raise their kids properly. I can drop my 10 year old child unattended in a library, and I know that it can use library organisation and blurb reading as well as asking the librarian clarifying questions to find an appropriate book. And yes perhaps sometimes its choices might make me want to clutch my pearls a bit, but it isn’t picking out straight up porn or murder manuals, and perhaps I need to get over the fact my child might come across a boob or a dick joke or a not particularly graphic murder.

Also just going off age ratings does not count as helping a child develop this skill. Age ratings are heavily tied to politics and culture and will not reflect what an individual child can handle. Theres kids media we skip, and a few 18 and R rated movies my child has watched. Commonsensemedia is a bit conservative with their own ratings however they do give details of any potentially objectionable content as well as allowing user ratings which run more reasonable. Use private browsing to get past the monthly review limit.

Anyway stop babying kids and let them read things that are a little bit fucked up. They’ll end up reading less gross shit that way anyway.