In an effort to ban all Zoomers, r/Drama set up a bot to ban everyone that has ever posted (a healthy amount of comments) on r/Teenagers.

Their ban message simply said “Underage” and they got a lot of responses, mostly from people declaring that they are adults, namely - middled aged people.

They. Got. So. Many responces from people that are way too old to be posting r/Teenagers that they took a look at their post histories.

This man said he was 56.

Here’s a 35 year old man hitting on a 14 year old.

This man was 40

51

Here’s a 45 year old man talking about “hot tween pussy”

P.S. My takeaway from this is that all minors should be banned from the Internet. It was NEVER a kid-friendly place.

I should not have said that. I should not have said that.

  • ThermonuclearEgg [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    43·
    6 days ago

    P.S. My takeaway from this is that all minors should be banned from the Internet.

    Should minors also be banned from Earth because it isn’t a kid-friendly place either?

    Don’t misinterpret this, Internet safety is definitely important to teach and people being creepy like this is definitely a problem… but at the same time, the Internet also has a lot of useful content and knowledge on it too, and it feels too reactionary to deprive people of that just because of their age (cf. the UK attempting exactly that). If we’re going to be banning anyone from the Internet, it should be the creeps who are making it a problem.

    If it makes a difference to you, I was a minor with a Reddit account back then, didn’t get creeped on, and I’m an adult on Hexbear now.

      • ThermonuclearEgg [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        16·
        6 days ago

        Thank you for taking the time to discuss constructively so that we could all come away learning from it. I really don’t like this “protect the children” rhetoric that IMHO dehumanizes kids and teenagers by arguing for removing far too many rights from them, even when it isn’t slippery sloped into affecting adults.

      • ThermonuclearEgg [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        19·
        6 days ago

        Who should be doing the allowing and monitoring? The sex offenders in government who repeatedly call for the age of consent to be lowered? Why should youth get collective punishment but nobody does anything to creeps?

        Should the government do nothing but pass on information to parents who might not be monitoring? That seems like quite an invasion of privacy no matter how you pull that off… do adults who care about privacy have to be subject to whatever the government defines as “educational” and appropriate for children? You also risk taking away safe spaces from queer youth and youth in abusive families, and some parents just won’t care anyways.

        For the sake of argument, let’s say some utopian socialist government managed to solve all of these questions, and more (e.g. how do we draw the line about “educational” and “abuse reporting”, what should happen if a kid gets a hold of a careless adult’s device, etc.) … what happens when these people get “old enough” and now a generation of new adults are subject to the Internet in its entirety with no experience or no experience of a BS filter to manage it? Won’t this create a host of new problems and people wanting to raise the limit further (e.g. “Who’s letting these adult children use the Internet unrestricted at 18 anyways? We shouldn’t let them until they’re developed 25 year olds…”)

        I’m actually curious how you would defend against that last example argument. Why should adults be trusted with the Internet? After all, they seemingly can’t help but pretend to be minors and be creepy, can they?

        • 2000watts@lemmygrad.mlOP
          12·
          6 days ago

          Truly, there is too much nuance, and a one big beautiful ban on all minors won’t solve everything.

      • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        18·
        6 days ago

        Monitored by whom? Their parents? Oops, you just outed a bunch of trans kids to their kkkristian parents and now they’re being shipped off to “troubled teen” camps to be abused.

          • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            20·
            6 days ago

            Stop falling for the kkkristians’ “protect the children” tricks, remember that almost all CSA is still done by “trusted adults” like parents and preachers, and leave the internet at a button everybody clicks that says I Am Definitely Over 18.

            • 2000watts@lemmygrad.mlOP
              41·
              6 days ago

              leave the internet at a button everybody clicks that says I Am Definitely Over 18

              Explain youself. Is minors watching porn a good thing now? I am from a quite traditional country.