This is a restored post from my WordPress. The original date is October 12, 2020. There are some small things wrong here, for instance, the AAM identity existed in the 00s and was merely recoined on Tumblr. But the general message still stands.
On Twitter you can find dozens of accounts that introduce themselves as adult attracted minors. Despite popular beliefs, this isn’t a troll identity, and it wasn’t made up by either maps or antis – it originates from 2018 tumblr and a blogger aam-what-aam (or something similar, I’m less sure of the username now), who coined the term and the flag to describe their own experiences with being attracted to people way past their age. They were anti contact and just wanted a space to talk about their life, they didn’t hide the fact that they took inspiration from the map community, but they never implied aams inherently belong in map spaces.
There are still plenty of aams who stay true to the original values of the movement, but on Twitter the aam community got corrupted to a degree, largely with help of amateur “pedo hunter” accounts who started advertising themselves as potential sexual partners for maps both in map and aam tags, and some genuine aams who just happened to have little sense of boundaries (for reasons unrelated to their paraphilias) and gladly followed the bad example. That caused maps, who didn’t really want anything from aams to begin with, to distance themselves.
I’ve witnessed this process whole, without being able to actually influence it. There was one encounter with a bait account, it happened in the beginning of this year, that got stuck in my memory. They came out as bait – and said they were being messaged by “popular maps” who wanted to date them. I requested evidence, to which they responded by blocking me. I was skeptical. But it wasn’t the first time I heard something like that, so I decided I must know who actually messages aam accounts. I had a theory they can get a creep in dms once in a while, but that won’t be someone affiliated with the map community. I was delaying finding it out, and finally got around to it on October 3, the day of my 12th suspension from Twitter.
With help from a friend, I made my next account, and this is how Nemi, a 14 year old exclusive aam (aoa 25-45) was created. This isn’t the first time I have a fake identity online, I had around 6-7, and one of them also was a teenage girl. It’s a bit of a weird habit, when I’m not sure about something, I re-enter the situation as a complete stranger and see how people treat me – for example, once, someone who politely disagreed with me when I spoke as a queer man (which I am) was extremely hostile when I expressed the same views while posing as a straight woman.
I was careful while making Nemi, she must have been more realistic than crude anti baits. I didn’t make a single NSFW or suggestive post, I didn’t follow NSFW accounts unless they followed me first, I didn’t dm anyone first at all. The tags I used were #aam, #aamcommunity, #aampride, and #mapcommunity3 (a new tag, apparently), and then I started following all maps I could find. I planned to run this blog for two weeks, and thought I’d see, maybe, 5-6 suspicious people.
In the first several hours of the blog’s existence, I got my first dm, and got offered child pornography.
I was outraged. But the experiment had to go on. In under a week of the account’s existence (spoiler alert – it got banned on October 8), I got 46 dms. These are all of them, I marked green the people who said something neutral, yellow – suspicious people, red – predatory people. Usernames of people I’m not 100% sure are creeps are hidden.
As you can see, in 5 days I got 12 full predators and 19 suspicious people. I repeat, I didn’t initiate any of these conversations. I didn’t make any suggestive moves in the conversation. I was passive and, when I wasn’t answering questions, only vented about school and covid and being misunderstood, for extra realism.
So, now let’s look at particular people. These two I’d call the most dangerous – they both had long non-sexual conversations with me before turning it wrong, listened to me complain about “my” life and acted like they were my friends.
Here come the rest of them.
4 out of 31 said they were maps, one didn’t have it in the bio, and even the others didn’t take part in map discourse. For comparison, some of the map discourse bloggers I followed just blocked me, one got concerned with my wellbeing and persuaded me to distance myself from pro contacts and gave me follow recommendations.
That’s around the outcome I expected, but I did not expect these numbers.
I think it’s time to say that I’m an idiot. I had no idea what it is like to be a teenage girl on twitter, and I still have no full understanding – those were only 5 days. It was an eye opening and a quite horrifying experience. So, I have several things to say – to girls, and to other teenagers of twitter.
- When you just make a brand new account, you’re not supposed to get a lot of dms from people you don’t follow. That doesn’t happen to grown men. If someone just randomly dms you, and you never saw them before, that’s a red flag. I’m not saying “block and run”, they might want something else, but watch out.
- Aam tags are where these people lurk. While the aam community itself is valid and I understand why it exists, the tags became a threat to people inside of it. I’m sorry. But I advise against using them, because even if they won’t get to you, they might go after your mutuals. The map tags seem to be safer, I asked several minor maps whether they get random dms from strangers out of a sudden, and they said it’s quite rare, so if you’re a minor map, you should be ok. But, of course, speak up if you see something.
- The aam community needs at least the same, if not bigger, amount of inner regulation as the map community has, and an anti contact core. Perhaps it would make sense to have a conversation with some CSA prevention organization about making a separate site for aams.
Also, from the bottom of my heart, a sincere “fuck you” to antis. You’re using a real danger for real teenagers and children as a weapon in your stupid vendetta against the map community. You could be working with us on removing predators. But you choose your hate over safety of twitter, and you mass report anti contact activists just because their existence insults you. On this fake account, I had one map tell me they have resources for therapy if I need it, and another try to explain why I should choose being anti contact. And antis called me a piece of shit and mass reported the account – even though they had no reasons to assume I wasn’t a real young girl. Also, these were antis who started making overly sexual bait accounts and attracted all these creeps. You made a mess, and who is going to clean it up? It shouldn’t be the maps’ responsibility to watch over young people of twitter, but so far the map community seems to do more for it than any other twitter community.
Leave a Reply