this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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because they made friends through social media and have no other communication channels with those friends?
Or are keeping in touch after a move. That would.have made a big diffrence in my life
So you want kids to be talking to strangers online? Bruh.
Oh my god, are you still on the "stranger danger" moral panic? That was like... 28 moral panics ago!
Kids are at significantly higher risk of being abused by someone they know than by strangers. The risk to kids from strangers online is hugely overblown.
Kids are also more at risk of abuse if they're vulnerable in some way, don't have many trusted adults to share concerns with, and are lonely/isolated. Banning social media for kids just pushes them into more niche platforms.
So, yes, I want kids to have the freedom to talk to whoever they want to.
There is incredibly credible evidence that the US president has raped children. These creeps are more emboldened than ever. You're crazy if you think I would willingly let my children talk to strangers.
What does Trump have to do with this? Do you really think Epstein was sliding into the DMs of kids on Instagram to recruit victims for Trump to abuse? That isn't how it works at all.
High profile cases and sensationalised media coverage make the problem seem more widespread and more significant than it is.
Statistics don't lie. Your kids are much more likely to be abused by you, your friends, your partner, and your family members, than they are by strangers. Do you also sequester your kids from family? Put them in a tall tower to protect them from all the dangers of the world? You are doing your kids a disservice by isolating them, in my opinion.
I first became active on web forums at the age of 10 and didn't keep my age secret at the time. Not once (!) did I encounter anyone who appeared to be a child predator or anything like that. So forgive me if I don't see a lot wrong with "kids talking to strangers online" although it certainly depends on the kid's age and maturity level and also what kind of online space it is.
You presumably grew up on a very different internet than the one we have today, and not in an era with a president who literally raped a child, emboldening these creeps.
Mid 2000s. Web forums based on UBB, WBB, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.
Went on to discover wikis at age 11, IRC at age 12, most of my social contacts in my teen years were with people I met online because they were generally a lot nicer than people I met IRL.
I would see nothing wrong with people born after me doing the same, although admittedly those years would have been a lot better if my school hadn't been full of people I had nothing in common with and I hadn't needed to use the Internet to socialize.
Yeah, that internet is VASTLY different from the internet of today.
You just didn't realize you were talking to pedophiles...
If you told me your age online and you were ten years old, i'd nope out of there pretty quick.
People who want to continue talking to little kids on the internet when they're in their 40s aren't doing it bcz 10 year olds are interesting.
I was also online from a really young age and had a lot of very risky behavior. In my experience, pedophiles are relatively rare, but extremely bad at hiding it. There is pretty much no way that OP wouldn't realize it. Like, they struggle to talk about anything except inappropriate subjects with kids. Everything you say they try to turn it into something weird. It's pretty much impossible to be friends with them and somehow not know.
Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.
That's different than what i did as a kid. I was talking to people on AOL messenger and chat rooms all the time. Didn't occur to me until much later that theses 40 year olds were trying to groom me.
Didn't work, but, it happened nonetheless.
I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don't remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don't think that person was there for any bad purposes.