Let's start with the behavior of adults in fandom spaces. Something I've noticed on a pretty regular basis is adults have a pretty nasty habit of assuming that everyone around them is also an adult unless proven otherwise. A large part of furry culture is freedom of expression- many people in the fandom are undoing a lifetime of emotional repression, often expressing this in a sexual manner because they've been afforded that freedom. This is far from a bad thing on its own, but this also leads me into the second point.
Consent. Furries are awful at and about it in every possible way. Sexual consent, emotional consent, physical contact, respect of boundaries, you name it and furries have violated it. I have not met a single person who's been in the fandom for more than a few months who has not had someone cross a boundary or lapse in consent on some front. People will come into your messages trying to engage in overly familiar roleplay with you, people will casually start talking about their sexual habits without establishing consent, even the more ""woke"" furries can and will push your boundaries if they're not satisfactory. Many furries have had their boundaries eroded away, had their consent violated regularly, and they feel like they have the right to do that to others, often without thinking about or realizing what they're doing.
And here we are at my third point, traumatized teens. Even this has a lot of segments to it, and hopefully I can cover them adequately. A lot of kids entering the fandom are already traumatized and isolated in some way, and are seeking community wherever they can find it. If they choose to stay, they will be treated inappropriately, it's not a matter of if but when. Ask any kid who's been around furries, or anyone who's grown up around furries, and they'll tell you that people have tried to engage with them in extremely inappropriate ways. I lost count of all the times (as a minor) people tried to start a sexual RP with me, asked me about my kinks, tried to guide me into talking about nsfw topics with them, tried to get me to engage with nsfw art. An unfortunately common experience of furries I know is adults showing us porn to make us uncomfortable because it was so funny, they we're just trolling u guyz((. Then there's the people who would just talk about nsfw topics without ever thinking about it or ever checking your age because "omg you seemed so mature."
That seems like the wrong choice. The internet allows for so much. How is your child going to get school work done when I assume they will be using some sort of online platform to assign it? I have learned a few hobbies off the internet, like flight simming, game dev, writing, and so on.
cook me uwu
If you don't ever use FA and have safe search enabled on google you will never encounter any NSFW, which parents should be doing that
But indeed, parents should make sure safe search is on.
You are right, there is no way to police the fandom. Any kid can lie about their age or whatever and bypass basically all that any site can do about that. That's why it should be up to the parents, not up to the entire fandom at large. Some kids are mature enough to use the internet/forums/etc, and if they are then they should totally be using it. Some kids really aren't ready for the internet and don't know how to be safe on it. Either way the parents should make sure they know what their children are up to online and provide more guidance/restriction if their kid needs it. There are many ways to help parents monitor their children, like putting up firewalls or other things that block their children from using certain websites.
I don't exactly know how it works, but it's probably some neural network type deal that looks for naughty things lol.haha I don't even know if safe search existed when I started browsing the internet
That'd be fantastic if adults weren't extremely prevalent in "child only" spaces.
exactly.
Child-only spaces isn't the solution. Far too easy for adults to lie about their age to lure minors in. And who has to moderate these spaces? More adults? How would we trust them? So on and so on. I'm pretty sure there was a social media platform/app that was for minors only or something and something bad happened on it so they shut it down.
There are far, far more than one.
we could propose a code of conduct wherein adults are allowed into sfw spaces with T's and C's - here's a few I came up with:
I just searched up that channel and hoo boy.
oh yeah. didn't he do a whole expose and find paedophile rings on sites targeted at children? beginning to think this is going to be a v e r y complex thing to handle. goddammit. why can't people just not be creeps to kids, man?
Because people are fucked.
