Hear! Hear! My daughter is an active Tumblr user - she reads and writes fan fiction - mostly science fiction/fantasy. She has “met” kids all over the world, including a trans kid who she will probably meet in person at a Con one day soon (I was worried about how well she would handle this until I found out that her friend that is teaching her art is trans and saw how beautifully she interacted with her when we ran into her one day). Hooray for social media I say!
When the issue of her possibly meeting this kid came up, I spoke with a friend of mine, an ex-cop, who used to track predators online (“It’s very easy to pretend to be a teenager,” he told me, “Just complain about your parents a lot.”) and he said that unless the person was close by, it was likely NOT a predator, that people tend to groom victims in their own area.
