If you follow NSFW artists, you’ve probably seen the 🔞 symbol. The “no one under eighteen” symbol marks a profile as NSFW. Minors, or those under the legal age, stay away from your profile, ideally.

In reality, you might have minors hiding their age and still following you.  What do you do then? In this article, we’ll talk about what will and won’t get you into trouble when it comes to minors seeing your nsfw art.

Table of Contents

• Solicitation of a Minor
• What If a Minor Lies?
• How to Protect Yourself
• What are the Consequences?
• Actual Stories
• Conclusion

Solicitation of a Minor

According to the Mario Madrid Law Firm, solicitation of a minor is “communicating in a sexually explicit manner or sending material of a sexual nature to a minor.”

This isn’t limited to private messages. As NSFW creators, you’re technically sharing sexual material when posting your works to a public space.

What If a Minor Lies About Their Age?

Many artists block minors based on publicly shown age. However, what if a follower doesn’t show it publicly?

The resources I found online stated not knowing someone’s age (because they lie or don’t mention it), can work to your defense. However, if you take no action to block or remove a minor from your account, then you’re at fault.

How to Protect Yourself

As NSFW creators, we’re worried about minors following us, or working with us. Make sure people who commission you are over 18.

In this post, user Celestina shares that “the client [agreeing] that they are over 18 and are authorized to purchase [NSFW content], is enough to protect you”. They recommend using a Google Form to get recorded confirmation.

If you’re on Twitter, make sure to include the 🔞/no one under eighteen symbol on your bio, and mark your tweets as sensitive. This will hide your content from anyone who lists their age below 18.

If you come across any underage followers (usually mentioning age on their bio), block them immediately. Many of the articles recommend ceasing contact after finding out someone is a minor, because “assuming you did not know or had [no] reason to know the individual was a minor, you already have a defense to charges”.  

Artists like QualonHive and Dan MappleThorpe routinely check new followers’ profiles. Also, remember to confirm your country’s age of consent, so you can block as appropriate.  

What are the Consequences?

Charges for solicitation is a minimum jail sentence of 10 years for federal charges, and additional for state charges (USA). This usually happens to those who share explicit material like nude selfies despite knowing someone is a minor.

On Twitter, violating the child safety policy results in either temporary account lock or permanent suspension, depending on the context. Twitter allows you to submit an appeal if you think you there was a mistake.  

Actual Stories

In my six years on Twitter, I haven’t heard of an NSFW artist whose gotten in trouble for unknown minors in their audience. After all, this is a problem social media platforms also face. Twitter can’t do anything if a minor lies about age when signing up.

However, it helps to be vigilant. NSFW voice actress MagicalMystic shared how minors would lie about their age to do NSFW voice acting auditions.

It helps to be vigilant and check if the people you work with are over 18. Click To Tweet

Another case is the story of Sisk, a furry artist who plead guilty to attempted sexual exploitation of a minor. According to SaveOurSisk.org, Sisk was approached by an underage girl who claimed to be legal. After finding the truth, Sisk cut off all contact.

When the girl ran away from home (supposedly unrelated), the father started an investigation on Sisk. There was no conclusive evidence. Five years later, Sisk was arrested following a traffic stop, before being charged for sexual exploitation.

You can read up on it and decide for yourself if things were handled properly. Regardless, it shows how the situation can get out of hand when interacting with minors, so it’s better to be careful.

Conclusion

In the end, you can only do so much with the info available to you. As long as you stay vigilant against minors following you, confirm the people you work with are legal, and not bring attention to it, then you’ll be fine.

Have you had any bad experiences with minors in your audience, or know someone who has? How was the issue resolve, or did it escalate?

Have you had any bad experiences with minors in your audience? Was the issue resolved, or did it escalate? Click To Tweet

Hope you enjoyed reading. Let me know what you think by commenting, or tweeting @HBeatsArt!