You just never know what you’re going to find on the internet. In that respect, you need to be cautious.
Nothing is safe from the touch of the rules of the internet. You need to understand that whenever you click on something, it carries a certain amount of risk.
What has been seen can never be unseen.
Redittor KP_ZA found themselves in that position. They went onto the popular subReddit “Today I F***ed Up” or “TIFU” to let their story unfold.
“TIFU by accidentally showing grade 7’s Disney erotica.”
The story began innocently enough:
“I am a camp counsellor for a local youth camp, and we are running online activities with the kids who just started their school holidays (whatever that means with [pandemic] restrictions).”
“For our age group (grade 7, so 12/13) we were running a ‘pub quiz’ run by a PowerPoint presentation with the questions and answers .”
During the quiz, there was a category question about Disney princesses, so our Original Poster, or OP, went in search of an image:
“I was in charge of making the PowerPoint and I was using the ‘insert image from online’ option, which limits my options but I didn’t feel like having a bunch of random images on my hard drive. One of the questions in the ‘Disney’ category was about Disney princesses.”
*WARNING: the below link is NSFW
“I used this image and didn’t notice anything wrong.”
The image shows the princesses wearing see-through tops.
Once the time came for the presentation, OP noticed their mistake all too fully.
“I was using split-screen, one screen for the PowerPoint and the other for the questions so the image was small to me. The first time I saw this picture in full size was during the activity with the children.”
“I had a mild panic attack and I very quickly ‘accidentally’ skipped to the answer. Afterwards I showed the other counsellors and we had a laugh about it.”
Other Redditors were also having a good laugh about it and shared their own TIFU stories.
“They’re in seventh grade. They can handle breasts. Half are growing them or already have them.”
“With those who aren’t, most look at them on the internet everyday anyway. Others have little interest but think their friend Michael looks cute in gym shorts.”
“And then there are asexuals who are like ‘so what? Boobs’.”~BokuNoSudoku
“OMG! This happened to me when I searched up the French Revolutionary group the ‘sans culottes’ who refused to wear the short pants of the aristocracy.”
“Well since sans culottes simply means without pants, that’s what we got. I looked at the kids and said, ‘well, it was nice working here!'”~teacherecon
“When I was little I was looking up Halloween costumes but I misspelled party city and ended up on a cosplay porn site. I went to my mom as an innocent 7 year old asking why Ariel wasn’t wearing a top.”
“Needless to say my mom put some parental controls on the computer until we were old enough to spell correctly.”~lunatheunicorn1
“The ‘insert image from online’ also once screwed me over. I was making a presentation for the company I interned at about recruitment diversity and backgrounds.”
“I searched for a flag of Spain and added it, fine. Until I go to the prelim review in my group (which included Spanish people) and they see I used the flag of Spain from the Franco era.”
“Essentially promoting fascism instead of hiring diversity.”~scrumpyjack18
Unfortunately, since the internet is so… colorful, it’s an easy mistake to make, even in a classroom.
“My high school art teacher once put Sheer Khan in Google instead of Shere Khan (tiger from the Jungle Book). While it is no longer the case, sheerkhan was apparently the name of a porn site so it was fairly amusing.”
“Further back in 2002 in a current events class researching President Bush in class lead a student to a website named bush which was also a porn site.”~akatoshslayer
“If it makes you feel any better, I spent the last day of (online) school this year letting my 4th grade small group pick some funny Pixar shorts to watch together on YouTube. They chose ‘Pearl’ and uh……it had some adult references I was NOT prepared for.”
“Pixar did me WRONG and I was horrified😭 I don’t think the kids even noticed though, thank god!”~ReaditSpecialist
“Very funny! Anyway, I wonder what the history of how nudity became inappropriate to see is.”
“Nudity is all around us, just look at the animals. Only time animals wear clothes is when their owner makes them.”
“But us humans, it’s as if we have accepted that our default appearance is fully clothed, while our natural nakedness, the way we were born, is some kind of sin against yourself and others.”~Adeno
“I used to use my iPad to download some children’s stories that we could read to our daughter. So the Princess and the Pea I thought was a good one as I remembered it from when I was a child.”
“Well, my husband started to read it to her in the evening and suddenly discovered it wasn’t the Princess and the Pea but the Princess and the Penis.”
“The cover was just plain pink so how was I to know? Hubby and I had a good laugh about it later.”~happy_freckles
And sometimes, we are just totally blindsided by these things on the internet.
“That’s nothing. When I was in high school, around on year 2 out of 3, we had a Danish class.”
“So one day, we had to watch a movie called Erasmus Montanus. One that all high school students had to watch at the time in Denmark.”
“Now, the teacher was relatively old, as far as I remember around 50-60 years old (this was 7-8 years ago). So he wasn’t very tech-savvy and used Windows Media player.”
“Everything was fine, but after the film was over, he didn’t know it would skip to the next video. Which was full on lesbian porn.”
“So the 50 year old guy showed that to the 17-18 year old kids. He jumped up, said something like ‘what did my wife put on my computer??’ and stormed out.”
“We never saw him again and got a substitute teacher after that. Shame, he was a good teacher.”~kedde1x
So for all of you who work with kids and use the internet as a part of your job, take heed.
The internet stops Rule 34 for nobody.