(no subject)
Dec. 1st, 2020 07:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetSo someone on Tumblr suggested that Fandom's next "home" should be a platform that doesn't allow minors. And I was only mildly bothered at first (see the first paragraph of my rant below), but then I had more time to think about it, and much worse likely consequences occurred to me.
Concerns with moving fandom to any 18+ exclusive platform: [Content Warning for CSA reference.]
For starters, it sucks to be excluding any group of people from the majority of fandom interaction based on age. Yes, there are legal and safety things that are important to observe and follow, but a certain subset of Tumblr is trying to push the "Fandom is not for anyone over 25/30/35/people five years older than me" thing, and it would suck from either end. And then there's the social transitioning thing; younger fans will still exist, and still want to gather, and they're not going to want to leave their friends behind for a brand new platform with a bunch of unfamiliar faces. Instead, I can easily imagine them trying to carve out their own 18+ corners of their other platform.
More importantly, though, if the majority of 18+ fans move to an exclusively 18+ platform, we're not going to get a platform full of only legal adults; we're going to get a platform with a lot of legal adults, and a non-zero number of minors who are lying about their age.
I'm not terribly bothered by minors lying about their age in itself; if they're old enough to be surfing the internet by themselves, I trust them to be able to curate their experiences. But we're going to get three groups of adults on an 18+ website when it comes to interacting with/planning for the existence of minors lying about their age.
First, we're going to get the people who haven't even thought about it. They're assuming that everyone on the website is eighteen years old or older. They probably aren't going to police their behavior any more than they would in any other presumed adults-only space.
Second, we're going to get the people who realize that kids can and will lie about their ages (some of whom know this from experience) and are going to try to be a bit more careful with the content they put out and the interactions they have.
Third, we're going to get the people who realize that kids can and will lie about their ages, and who are predators that will take advantage of it.
From a strictly legal standpoint, and also a consent standpoint, the first two groups of adults aren't in a great position if they find out the person they're interacting with is a minor, but presumably they know how to shut down interaction as appropriate if that happens.
The third group, though, is a major problem. I mean, they're terrible in general, but they're also going to use the fact that their victims are lying about their age to be on an adults-only site to keep abusing them.
Any of their victims are going to be terrified to come forward, because that will mean admitting that they lied about their age in the first place, and they'll be afraid of getting into even more trouble for that and losing any and all support from the rest of the community. And that is what really worries me about trying to move the majority of fandom to an 18+ exclusive platform.
Long story short, trying to remove Explicit/18+ content from fandom isn't going to work, and trying to remove people who are under eighteen from fandom also isn't going to work. What might work is planning for the existence of both.
Concerns with moving fandom to any 18+ exclusive platform: [Content Warning for CSA reference.]
For starters, it sucks to be excluding any group of people from the majority of fandom interaction based on age. Yes, there are legal and safety things that are important to observe and follow, but a certain subset of Tumblr is trying to push the "Fandom is not for anyone over 25/30/35/people five years older than me" thing, and it would suck from either end. And then there's the social transitioning thing; younger fans will still exist, and still want to gather, and they're not going to want to leave their friends behind for a brand new platform with a bunch of unfamiliar faces. Instead, I can easily imagine them trying to carve out their own 18+ corners of their other platform.
More importantly, though, if the majority of 18+ fans move to an exclusively 18+ platform, we're not going to get a platform full of only legal adults; we're going to get a platform with a lot of legal adults, and a non-zero number of minors who are lying about their age.
I'm not terribly bothered by minors lying about their age in itself; if they're old enough to be surfing the internet by themselves, I trust them to be able to curate their experiences. But we're going to get three groups of adults on an 18+ website when it comes to interacting with/planning for the existence of minors lying about their age.
First, we're going to get the people who haven't even thought about it. They're assuming that everyone on the website is eighteen years old or older. They probably aren't going to police their behavior any more than they would in any other presumed adults-only space.
Second, we're going to get the people who realize that kids can and will lie about their ages (some of whom know this from experience) and are going to try to be a bit more careful with the content they put out and the interactions they have.
Third, we're going to get the people who realize that kids can and will lie about their ages, and who are predators that will take advantage of it.
From a strictly legal standpoint, and also a consent standpoint, the first two groups of adults aren't in a great position if they find out the person they're interacting with is a minor, but presumably they know how to shut down interaction as appropriate if that happens.
The third group, though, is a major problem. I mean, they're terrible in general, but they're also going to use the fact that their victims are lying about their age to be on an adults-only site to keep abusing them.
Any of their victims are going to be terrified to come forward, because that will mean admitting that they lied about their age in the first place, and they'll be afraid of getting into even more trouble for that and losing any and all support from the rest of the community. And that is what really worries me about trying to move the majority of fandom to an 18+ exclusive platform.
Long story short, trying to remove Explicit/18+ content from fandom isn't going to work, and trying to remove people who are under eighteen from fandom also isn't going to work. What might work is planning for the existence of both.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 12:26 am (UTC)Well said. Having been one of those minors who lied about my age to access 18+ sites in my youth, and having known younger kids who lied about their ages because COPPA meant no official under-13s, I have no faith in age-gating to actually keep kids out. It's not a realistic thing. It's never been a realistic thing; it's always been basically a CYA for site owners. It worries me that we've got this kind of... I dunno what to call it, this attitude that kids must be confined to kid-specific spaces? Intergenerational (and across smaller age gaps too) friendships have been a really positive thing for me my whole life, but it seems like there's parts of the internet where any interaction between an adult and child is viewed as suspect, and that makes me worry. Seems like it's more likely to cut kids off from good resources than protect them, overall....
no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 01:06 am (UTC)OP of the post I'm referring to feels like, aside from the potential for abuse, the gatekeeping of minors away from fandom central is a feature rather than a bug; they cited the Purity Culture Brigade's "Think of the Children!" hand-wringing as a reason, and feel like having an official age cut-off is a better answer than making everything kid-safe. (They had no suggestions for how to deal with the predator problem in their response.)
I took their response to mean that we weren't going to see eye-to-eye on a fundamental level and decided as a result not to respond again, but wow. I mean, part of me does miss the time when it was cooler to pretend to be an adult than to shame adults for "invading" what some people seem to think of as "kids spaces"? But major fandom age segregation seems like a really bad idea on multiple levels, the fact that it ultimately won't work pretty significant among them. About the best it can offer is taking away the Antis' "Think of the Children!!!" whacking stick, but I feel like tagging things appropriately would do that better anyway, even if attempted age segregation might be more effective in the short run.
To repeat myself, we're either going to get adult fandom content that's disguised as stuff that's minor-safe (via Antis' harassment campaigns), or we're going to get minors who disguise themselves as adults to access fandom content in general. I feel like I'm not being unreasonable if I don't think either of those is a good solution.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 02:00 am (UTC)Funny that I came across this today, as I happened to see a tweet about pillowfort going public soon and I thought, "i forgot about that site!" since it's trying to be something between tumblr and lj. I didn't bother to get a paid key for the beta, but i think i remember reading something about being able to tag/filter nsfw stuff similarly here in dreamwidth. Does a tagging system like that still have big issues, or is it exactly as you pointed out to accommodate both?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 05:45 am (UTC)Pillowfort and a couple other platforms are included in their discussion over here, if you want to take a look (including OP's response to my essay). OP is mainly pushing for something called Bobaboard, which has some ...interesting... auto-anonymizing features that would make keeping a consistent identity challenging. Bobaboard was founded on very solidly pro-kink/otherwise inclusive ground, and apparently has some really solid anti-harassment and anti-bigotry rules baked in, but I'm still very wary of trying to move the majority of fandom, including as many adult fans as humanly possible to an adults-only platform. I definitely understand wanting to defang the Fandom Purity Police! I just don't think this is the way to do it.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 11:26 pm (UTC)Anyway in that specific context, boba's 18+ rule doesn't bother me because:
1) it's really not trying to be for everyone, and the main dev has put a lot of thought with how it would work in tandem with other fandom spaces
2) currently it's in alpha development so in order to get an account you have to know someone who has an account well enough to give them your email address so the likelihood of minors ending up on the platform is pretty low
If/when those two points change I expect boba will at least consider modifying the 18+ restriction in response & I'd definitely be on the side of replacing it with something more flexible
no subject
Date: 2020-12-04 08:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 05:10 am (UTC)I guess I don't see why an age-restricted site would have any more problems than an unrestricted one - there will be a few people trying to prey on minors either way, but a site where minors are welcome and their age is easily detected is going to have more of them and make them easier to target. Nothing is stopping them from lying about their age on unrestricted sites, either, so it's not as though that's a unique issue in an 18+ space; anyone in an 18+ Discord, for instance, would have the same pressure on them if someone was acting inappropriately toward them, even though Discord also allows younger users.
The 18+ site would have to have a clear policy for inappropriate behaviour that covers both users, but that's a good idea for any site where an unequal rulebreaking scenario (false profile information versus actual abuse) can occur.
I do agree that there's a lot of good questions about whether newly-aged-in adults would join a different site, and how they might choose or build alternatives! Fandom is already significantly fractured across platforms, now, and I don't know that it will ever return to a more centralised site, no matter what restrictions or protections are put in place. It does seem to skew by age, too, in a general way (the average age of fans using DW versus that of fans on Tumblr or Discord is pretty clear) so I'm not sure any one platform currently serves the needs of both minor and adult fans.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 05:36 am (UTC)As for predators, I may not have put it exactly right in my initial rundown here. One of the biggest and most important tools in an abuser's playbook is social isolation. If a minor who lied about their age to get access to fandom in an 18+ only area is targeted, the predator has that much less work to do themselves; the target runs the risk of being automatically ejected from their current community and losing their social connections if they come forward. Not to mention, in this scenario, being cut off from the central hub of fandom, where everything interesting happens. I certainly wouldn't want to be cut off from the main source of fandom interaction for whatever my current hyperfixation is, especially if I cared so deeply about it that I lied about my age to get access in the first place. (Yes, that feels like a minor lie now, but when I was that age, it felt a lot heavier.)
Anyway, here is the post in question, including OP's response to my essay above. OP agreed that predators are a potential problem, but seems more concerned with getting away from the Fandom Purity Police—who I agree are annoying at best and outright abusive and dangerous at worst, but disagree that moving the beating heart of fandom to an 18+ website is the right move to combat. I figured that OP and I weren't going to see eye-to-eye on a fundamental level about that, so I declined to respond further.