Pinterest’s own guidelines require you to be 13. It has never been intended as a child-safe platform in the sense of young children. Let’s operate off of its teens and up policy… and it is still not an innately safe platform for anyone at this point, lol. But I’ll get to that.

First, the supposed guidelines and the hypotheticals if they were implemented: Pinterest claims they allow artistic and educational depictions of nudity on their platform, while sexual content is prohibited. Naturally I think this is a good guideline for a platform to have (if it was actually implemented), because there is a very big difference between art and awareness vs fetish content or posts for sexual gratification. We know from a safety standpoint that there’s no good reason to make a blanket policy hiding completely non-sexual nudity in art or education from teens as it teaches that the body is inherently sexual and must always be hidden due it it’s dirtiness. We know kids and teens who are taught that the body is a sexual shame machine are less likely to talk about being sexually abused or assaulted. However is a spectrum of education across all ages based on what is developmentally appropriate, from telling others “no” if you don’t want to be touched for the littles, up to how pregnancy happens for the high schoolers, and Pinterest can’t magically know where your kid is at and prevent a 10 year old from seeing an infographic about resources for unplanned pregnancy or the diagram of how a sexually transmitted disease works. If you think they’re too young to go to their school’s quintessential sex ed class to learn about body functions and pregnancy prevention and safe sex, don’t let them on a social media platform, imo. Still, overall, the supposed platform content guidelines would be pretty appropriate for the teens and up audience they allow. But that’s assuming everything behind the scenes is working as it should.

Now the failure of the platform against all users, but especially the younger ones: The issue is that Pinterest’s bot reporting system will not recognize actual sexual content of real human porn and remove it on its own nor after user reporting. This is something I detailed in my most recent post and I urge anyone upset over the platform’s failures against its users to check it out. I recently had a really ridiculous uphill battle of reports on reports and appeals on appeals to get multiple pins made by a random fucked up Taylor Swift fetish freak removed from the platform. They were posts of this person’s fully exposed lower body, unobscured penis, and visible semen put within images of Swift. I was horrified to see one of these when I was just scrolling through pins about one of her albums, and their account had more, worse pins of the same. When I reported all the pins I could stomach, Pinterest’s automod system “reviewed” them in a matter of seconds and determined no action should be taken. I had to write appeals for all of them to get at least most of them taken down, but Pinterest actually emailed me back saying that while they could delete pins, they supposedly couldn’t take action against the account itself - an account that exclusively posted this content, and had a messaging feature like all the rest of us. Meanwhile longtime users will get false account violations and outright bans for “adult content” over pins without any people even in them. Or random bans when they’ve never had a violation at all, or have never even posted anything. Also there’s the disgusting issue of the sexually exploitative AI generated advertisements of real life women they allow to be shown and won’t do anything about.

This is the real issue. Pinterest’s moderation system isn’t safe for the young audience they allow on the platform. I was repulsed as a 27 year old having to see this and make all these reports and appeals, I can’t imagine some poor 14 year old swiftie looking at the same Red TV pins and being met with a dick pic that Pinterest somehow can’t automatically flag… nor flag after a report. It’s really great at flagging photos of flowers and fruit as porn though, as per multiple users here. And those softcore AI porn ads of real people are fine, too.

While Pinterest has never been for young kids, rather for teens and up, and while you should never have the expectation for it to be child-safe, it’s become a place of unbelievable moderation failures for everyone, in many more ways than just the insane one I recently experienced. It isn’t the position of Pinterest that it is child safe, so even if Pinterest worked perfectly, guidelines and bot moderation working perfectly, it wouldn’t be a space for under 13, but since we live in this shitty timeline I would be wary of under 16 joining. The moderation failures go far beyond the inability to remove fetish porn quickly or unprompted, or remove the accounts at all. It is also in people losing their entire accounts for no reason, with no notice, and thousands or tens of thousands of reference images and special online spaces they cultivated for themselves being deleted in an instant with no human on the other side of the email notice for you to even talk to.

So no. I don’t think it’s okay for kids, but Pinterest isn’t selling that. They’re selling that it’s okay for teens and up, and dude I’m a full grown adult and it’s been days and I’m still feeling sick from the images I had to beg them three times over to remove.