casperscove-deactivated20221016:
Hey. Minors following me. Internet safety is key!! NEVER include these in your bio/byf:
- Medical diagnoses - this is nobody’s business but yours. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for why you are the way that you are
- Trauma - same reason as above
- Triggers - people can use these against you! Don’t give people tools to hurt you. No one has to know what tags you block. Just block tags to stay safe!
- Age - age is okay for adults to include but is iffy when you’re a teen. Predators want this information, don’t give people more than they need. Just state that you’re a minor, that’s all that anyone needs to know.
In general: stay safe. If you’re not comfortable with every stranger out there having access to this information, you shouldn’t post it on the internet.
Play devil’s advocate and ask yourself about what would happen if someone searched for your information with intent to hurt you. You do NOT owe anyone an explanation!
adding on to this post, i agree w all of OPs points, but i also highly advise against super young teens posting their face on the internet, its so easy to take peoples selfies + name and find stuff out like your school and then figure out the rough area in which you live. same with your phone number. be super careful about what you put out there. once you post it, it really is here forever.
OP already said this so I’m just reiterating to emphasize:
The golden rule of information sharing on the internet is: What would happen if someone saw this who wanted to hurt me?
If the answer is that it would make it easier to harass you, identify you, contact you, or god forbid find you, don’t put it online. You can’t fully control who does and does not see that information–not even with privacy settings.
yeah
…and there is a lot of rhetoric going around today’s internet that… is not unreasonable; makes valuable points about human interaction, and yet, in the process, unfortunately…. discourages this kind of safe thinking.
like
“if I post personal info and someone uses it to hurt me, that’s their fault, and they should be the ones who have to change, not me. telling people to hide things about themselves to be safe is victim-blaming.”
or
“this is a thing you can say if you ARE (member of marginalized group), but NOT if you are (privileged group)” –even if this doesn’t explicitly state it, it implies that everyone is required to post public info about all their marginalizations before they enter the discourse, or else they risk being accused of hate speech
and, unfortunately– these are not nonsensical points that we should just ridicule people for making.
they are, in their own ways, valid.
victim-blaming is a real problem. and it is often relevant to consider what groups a person belongs to, before you argue that the things they say are bigoted.
and I am not sure if there’s a truly reliable way to reconcile that with the equally valid fact that we sometimes need to advise people to keep things private for safety.
and– as with every line of reasoning that ends in “there’s probably no complete solution, and no single group of people who can fix this by changing specific behaviors”– it’s not a line of reasoning that will ever be popular and widely shared.
i reach this sort of conclusion a LOT in my analyses of various human interactions. but when I state them, they pretty much get ignored every time. …because they’re, by nature, unsatisfying. they offer no solution.
so… maybe this time I’ll just say that my conclusion is, “things might be a little better if we don’t try to point fingers at a specific group of people or a specific behavior for being at fault 100% of the time.”
that’s kind of a solution.
i guess.