Everyone I Don't Like Is A Pedophile
Since the late 2010s, I've noticed the rise in concerns over children's safety, especially on the internet. However, I have also noticed the actions and attitudes towards this matter have gotten to the point of absolute absurdity and are either completely arbitrary or actually diminish the safety of kids.
First let's discuss regulations and people's desire for it. While at the time of writing, recent events have people kinda woken to how age verification is a dumb idea mostly concerning data breaches and privacy and such, before this, I would often hear of people's desire for a regulated internet where people would have to prove they're an adult to do stuff online. Countless times I've heard how "people under 18 should just be banned from the internet". While sometimes it's just a joke because the person doesn't want to deal with snot-nosed brats, most times, it's in an unironic context with concern over the safety of kids. Usually, the concern is specifically over porn, sexual groomers, or "inappropriate content".
As much as I prefer not to be vulgar in my articles, the belief that "people under 18 should be banned from the internet" is utterly fucking retarded and the worst possible thing you can do ensure kids' safety. Barring the fact this is objectively impossible to accomplish anyways and they'd adapt and find bypasses such as using dark nets, the single biggest reason this is stupid comes down to two words: street smarts. Assuming someone doesn't spend their entire internet life in curated, sterile social media environments, internet users will learn of and adapt to dangers on the internet. Let's assume children are banned from the internet until they're 18 and then they have all the freedom they want on it. Well now you have a bunch of internet-illiterate and very likely tech-illiterate adults flooding the internet that are vulnerable to the dangers of it.
Classrooms barely teach internet safety, only teaching the bare basics like password confidentiality. And while they used to teach kids not to share information about themselves on the internet, as I discussed in Citizen-Controlled Surveillance, kids nowadays are essentially encouraged to do so and often dox themselves on social media. Even if schools did teach proper computer and internet safety and security, something I very much wish for them to do, books smarts is only part of what will ensure kids' safety. They need to develop knowledge through natural means to truly understand dangers and how to mitigate them. I'm not saying they need to be victimized (although the bullshit I faced both online and in real life as a child certainly helped me learn good) but they do need to learn about stuff outside of a sterilized teaching environment.
For example, many people I'm sure develop their internet literacy through miscellaneous things like watching YouTube videos about how people were caught for things or how people were victimized through the internet. Think of all the people whom learned of geolocation data in Exif data of photos by learning about the Burger King Foot Lettuce meme, the videos about how people were harassed online such as how they got doxed, or videos about predators and how they manipulate their victims, giving people an idea of the predatory behavior to look out for when talking to people online which gets me to my next point about how age-gating kids from "inappropriate content" is dumb.
How many of you watched R-rated movies, played M/18+ video games, read banned books as kids? Did any of this ever "hurt" you? No, it didn't and neither will "inappropriate content" hurt kids. And I'm not talking about porn; I'm talking about all the stuff that can just be generically labeled as inappropriate. For example, I like to watch stuff about wacky people, some of whom are deranged harmful criminals that have done reprehensible stuff including hurting kids. I think to an extent, these kinds of videos can actually be educational for everyone, including kids on how not to act and how to notice stuff in people, groups, and environments that are predatory. However, almost universally, the people who make these kinds of videos always freak out when a commenter or chatter says they're 17 or whatever, going on about how kids shouldn't be watching their stuff when the vast majority of the time, their stuff is no more inappropriate than a PewDiePie video from the early 2010s.
Even if I am wrong or these people still want to prevent kids from watching their stuff anyways, they will never age-restrict their videos which brings me to yet my next point: Protecting kids is just a grift. If people who made "inappropriate content" truly cared about preventing kids from watching their videos or viewing their other stuff, they would age-restrict their videos or take measures on other platforms to prevent kids from seeing their stuff but that would cut into their revenue and we all know they absolutely cannot have that happen. So seeing as they will freak out about kids seeing their inappropriate stuff on the internet despite taking not even basic measures to prevent this, it in a way says they care more about profit than children's safety according to their own logic.
This obsession over children on the internet has been massively caused by what is essentially an industry built on the sensationalism of the harming of children. Think of all the predator catching videos, all the slop video essays about groomers, all the Patreon shilling, how this obsession over groomers and predators started ever since these videos rose in popularity. I believe stuff like this is why people on the internet today are so uppity about kids or as they all say "minors". It's an industry perpetuated by sensationalism which in turn makes them overly sensitive when it comes to anything to do with kids which is why half this stuff is essentially "18-year-old e-dates 17-year-old" or "Adult makes sex joke in presence of minor". This hypersensitivity towards kids is just a memetic virus akin to how people think crime is on the rise and the world so much more dangerous because the media sensationalizes bad things happening, making things seem much worse than they are. It's just sensationalism creating the illusion of an increase in danger.
I've also noticed how the word "minor" has risen dramatically in its use and it's so overused, I cringe every time I hear it. The word is used in legal contexts to refer to people under the legal age to do something and can still be used in reference to legal adults such as a 20-year-old who is a minor when it comes to alcohol laws in the US. Because a minor is someone under the age of 18 in most contexts, I believe people began using this as a synonym for child because when talking about predators and whatever, it's always law and legality that's invoked to explain the wrongness of the perpetrators. It's not that an adult victimized a child, it's that an adult victimized a minor which is why people freak out over people who could've gone to high school together e-dating or whatever.
This semantic shifting has bastardised the English language to the point that talking to, communicating with, interacting with, whatever, is all synonymous with predation and sexual grooming in any context involving a kid, creating a sort of reverse doublespeak. Kids online are practically their own caste that adults are forbidden to have any interaction with whatsoever and this just makes people who would never hurt kids too afraid to talk to one, even to help them out of fear of being labeled a predator while actual sickos are more careful in their predation. If you've ever played an online game and one of your teammates or party members just happened to be a high-schooler and you talked to them, congratulations, you are now a dirty pedophile because you talked to a minor. Please face the wall while you await execution.
Even though people always invoke the law, they sure don't know anything about it. You know why an alleged predator or groomer or whatever never gets put in jail? Because they either never broke the law or if they did, the police aren't gonna waste their time to subpoena companies for information and logs, conduct an investigation, and hold a trial because some dipshit played pretend investigator. For example, the age of sexual consent is often invoked to explain why what someone is doing is illegal and therefore bad but guess what? Did you know the age of consent is actually lower than 18 in most jurisdictions? Not that it matters anyways because the vast majority of the time, the crimes are solely internet-related which is legislated by completely different laws and as already stated, massively complicates police investigations and it's not worth their time to investigate the umpteenth Discord creep. Plus it's especially easy to frame people for being predators using fake or out-of-context evidence on the internet and I've seen this kind of thing happen many times.
I know there's a minority of people that do actually get sickos put in jail but this seems to be a relatively recent thing because a lot of people have caught on to the ineffectiveness of predator hunting and groomer callouts and producers of this stuff had to adapt. Assuming they don't suck, you then get the opposite problem with people criticizing them for the dumb reason being that it's "too dangerous" and countless times through the past few years I've heard "One of these days the predator is going to be mentally deranged, have a gun, and someone is gonna get shot.". Well, it still hasn't happened yet. You can tell these kinds of people never had to have any physical confrontation in their life and always relied on others like the police to solve their problems. Guess what, if you want to stop bad people, you have to take risks even with your physical safety. While the good ones usually do work with the police, as already mentioned, the police are usually completely useless so if you want predators to be stopped, vigilantism is often the only option.
I know people always pull the "Parents should be better." crap but guess what? That's just not gonna happen. As sad and fucked up as it is, most parents take the easy way out and would rather give the little shit an iPad so the child will just shut the fuck up so Mommy and Daddy can browse T*kTok in peace. For the most part, unless the parent is exceptionally technologically literate or works in some computer-related OpSec field, they likely wouldn't even be able to educate their own children on actual internet and computer safety even if they wanted to. The blackpill is so many kids are gonna be raised by the internet and if that's the case, the internet should at least try to guide them towards proper internet safety but as already stated, everyone's too scared of being labeled a pedophile for even talking to a kid so I don't see this ever happening anytime soon and kids will just continue to get themselves victimized due to their ignorance and further fueling the sensationalist content machine.
I want sickos to be stopped. I still want people to make stuff about them, report on it, and make fun of them as long as it isn't what I call predoslop. But regardless, it doesn't matter how many predators or groomers you stop. As callous as it may sound, it's up to the kids themselves to protect themselves. When a predator is stopped, you aren't preventing a kid from being victimized, you're only preventing them from being victimized by that one individual. This is why I'm such a proponent of kids developing internet literacy which can only be achieved by their being on the internet at least after learning the proper safety basics. The police aren't gonna save the kids, predator hunters aren't gonna save the kids, laws aren't gonna save the kids, parents aren't gonna save the kids, you are not going to save the kids. Ultimately the only ones who can save the kids are the kids themselves.
Written 2025-8-5 Published 2025-9-1