Putting in boundaries around internet use and meetups (regardless of where the people are from), as well as expecting behavior standards of one's adolescent children is not to protect their innocence, it is part of helping them gain the skills needed to become functional adults. At least it is for me.
You MUST have these conversations with your kids, IMO, if you do not want to be negligent. Maybe the parents of people 30-50 currently could claim some degree of ignorance but I do not think anyone with little kids NOW can.
You can have comprehensive sexuality education (it starts at home but I also highly recommend the Our Whole Lives/OWL sexuality education that is usually put on by UU or UCC churches, it's a developmentally appropriate curriculum that starts in groups for K/1, again in late elementary school, again in jr high, again in HS and theres adult discussion groups as well), be committed to being open and affirming and /still/ have rules.
For our family (no kind of special issues for us as far as being on the spectrum or severe mental illness) that has meant an unfolding process of release of responsibility from parent to the child throughout their childhood and adolescence. On the outside it probably looks to tiger moms and helicopter dads like we are on the permissive end (my teens do not have curfews, they are allowed to travel in and out if the big city on their bus cards even if we arent there and are expected to utilize public transportation on their own during the day unless it's an emergency, they all now have their own devices that we dont put trackers on). But what they do not see is the rules/process to get there, the fact that nobody was allowed to have smart phones until high school (eldest had one briefly in jr high but repeatedly broke rules so it was taken away and replaced with a texting phone until we all agreed he was ready to try again--in high school). None of the kids had computers in their rooms until they were juniors in high school (and they bought them themselves, just like they pay monthly for their cell phone line).
My kids have gone to different cons since they were around 11-12; this is the first year I will not be on site as a condition of their going because they are vets and they will be 18 and 17, but I have been invited to go anyway (probably so I can be mom-bag-of-holding for cosplay shit) and may go anyway (they've offered to buy my badge).
My kids usually tell me things relatively soon. Sometimes I have to pry it out of them. Lots of their friends tell me things. We have spent many hours helping our kids help their friends (and sometimes had to contact other parents, which made our kid/s mad but they later understood why).
Shit still happens though. People do not understand what it is like to drop your trans teen off at a friend's house that you dont know well and then stress vomit all the way home because it happens to be the same day that you hear about a trans teen being lured by "friends" to come over and then is jumped, raped, and/or murdered. Even with all our safeguards we still have had to walk a child through/help them cope/get help to cope with them getting doxxed and getting death and rape threats; and I am sure it will not be the last time no matter how conscientious they are, because none of my kids is interested in walling off from interacting with people and living in a bunker.
There's plenty of people from shit backgrounds and awful parents that dodge bullets and turn out to be mostly functional. There's plenty of people who end up being shitty even though they come from pretty normal to pretty good home environments and people that care for them. There is no magic formula.
You do the best you can for each kid. You try to encourage them to do the best they can for themselves and others. Hopefully your relationship will be strong enough to deal with awkwardness and anger from time to time, since I doubt it is possible to escape that in any relationship.
I know I was a lot better parent before I actually had to start doing it. It never hurts to start thinking about this stuff, though. And I think community is very important as well.
