Safe on Social library
185 items in the Safe on Social library.
Article
If device makers become the authority that labels people as children, what stops an adult who wants contact with children from being labelled a child? On current evidence, this is a real gap, and almost no public guidance addresses it.A few years ago, over lunch in London, I sat across from a member of Pornhub’s senior management team. I had come to talk about one thing: the sheer volume of fetishised Roblox content on their platform. Roblox avatars, recorded in-game performing sexual acts, then
Article
By George Peterkin - Managing Director of Mind Your Health and Founder SoS BEACON Sadly, conversations about the loss of three very young people has entered a great many Australian homes this past week. The subject has been all over our media, and a news story like this never stays where it started. It travels through social media feeds and school group chats, gathering rumour and half-truths as it goes, until it reaches a child alone with a phone or surfaces as a question from the back seat on
Article
“We’ll just get them a dumb phone.”Parents and carers say it all the time, usually with relief. The hard decision has been put off and a simple one has taken its place. I understand that relief, and I also think the word “simple” does a lot of damage, because it closes the conversation at the exact moment it should open.Please let me explain before anyone runs to the comments section. Waiting is a valid decision, and for many children it is the right one. If your family has decided on no phone a
Article
Free Robux, it says, but only if you claim them in the next few hours. There is a link, then a login box, and for a child who's been saving for a new avatar outfit since the last school holidays, there's little reason to hesitate.Next, the child types their username and password into a page that looks exactly like Roblox. Sometimes they are asked for their two-factor code as well, and they hand that over too, because as far as they understand it, that is what the code is for. Then the page quiet
Article
Most of us think of AI as something you ask a question and it answers. An AI agent (Agentic AI) goes further. You give it a job and it goes off on its own, clicking through websites and making decisions until the job is done. Nobody checks each step.On 18 June 2026, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was testing one of these agents. Its job sounded harmless as it was told to find out how much the government spends on medicines. It went to a Medicare statistics website run by Services Australia.
Article
The person at the next table never signed up for any of it. Snap has just announced its latest Specs, they are marketed as augmented reality glasses. The website is slick and clearly focused on making them a fashion statement. With a price tag of US$2,195 they are not an impulse buy, but we have said that about a plethora of other consumer tech when first released and five minutes later there was buy now pay later options. The feature list of Specs is like someone emptied the junk drawer of the
Article
It is not hard to conjure up this vision in your mind, as you may have even contemplated it yourself. A complaint letter, often date-stamped as being sent late at night, when a parent may have spent the evening turning something over and over in their mind. It could be one of a million things that happened during the week prior, a phone call from the year adviser, a report comment that stung, a child who came home quiet and would not say why. Somewhere around 10pm, with the house finally still,
Article
On Tuesday, the Government released its draft Digital Duty of Care, and with it a proposal that would let Australians switch off the algorithm. The Prime Minister has called it My Feed, My Way. I said publicly this week that algorithmic choice is the most consequential idea to enter Australian online safety policy in years, and I meant it. Then I read the draft, and the feeling I have been trying to argue myself out of for 24 hours is that, as it currently stands, this is a tick in a box, a qui
Article
My inbox is full of the same question. Parents, principals, and wellbeing coordinators are all asking the same thing.Is this real? Could our government actually make the platforms turn the algorithm off?Here is what is on the table. Chanel Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, used her National Press Club address to ask the federal government to make algorithmic feeds opt-in rather than opt-out. Her Fix Our Feeds campaign describes an experience that will feel familiar to anyone who was online
Article
Teaching is the only profession that requires you to front up in front of your abuser the very next morning, mark their work fairly, and keep them safe. If you know, you know.It is the morning after. You are in the driver's seat with the keys in your hand, and you have not started the car. You are not crying, not yet. You are running the words back, the ones a fifteen-year-old said in front of twenty-eight other children, and then the rest of it, the post that went up afterwards with a photograp
Article
If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game.When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often use the analogy of so
Article
Most of us have not slowed down. We have scrolled past it a hundred times and filed it under silly.If you have been anywhere near TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts in the last six months, you have seen them. AI-generated soap operas starring fruit people.A strawberry cheats on her husband with a banana. A jealous watermelon confronts a "gold digger" cherry. A garlic leaves his wife for giving birth to another mango. A pineapple child throws their strawberry sibling overboard. A pregnan
Article
For years people have said that if we just had more self-control, were better parents, and set clearer boundaries, everything would be okay. They told us to be stricter, but also more relaxed, and to find a balance between the two. This way of thinking puts all the blame on the parents. It’s always been yy assumption that big tech companies are trying to shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto parents. They want us to feel guilty for not being good enough parents, so we’re left s
Article
This week the IWF released new figures on child self-reported deepfake abuse. This is what to do if you child or student says an image isn’t real. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and Childline released their latest Report Remove figures for the past six months last week. It is a service in the UK that lets under eighteens flag sexual images or videos of themselves and get them taken down. The sobering numbers that have been reported are that 420 of those reports are deepfaked images that we
Article
On Monday 3 August the Australian eSafety Commissioner released its most detailed study yet of how children are using generative artificial intelligence. The report, titled Talking to Machines: Children’s Experiences with AI Assistants and Companions, is based on a survey of one thousand nine hundred and fifty children aged ten to seventeen, conducted between the second of February and the fourth of March 2026.Seventy eight per cent of the children had used an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gem
Article
From time to time, distressing or harmful material circulates online that children and young people may come across often without ever looking for it. When this happens, we write to you not to alarm you, but so that you are prepared and know what to do.We are deliberately not describing any specific material or naming anyone involved, and we ask that you do the same. Please do not go looking for it, and please do not name it in front of children.Why we ask you not to name it. When a specific
Article
Five years ago, it was the occasional email. A handful of parents starting to ask bigger, harder questions of the organisations their children spend time with. Now that same question lands in my inbox almost every day.It comes from thoughtful parents wondering about consent forms , the "permission to publish" forms that decide where images of their children end up online. Dance, martial arts, the local footy club or school , it doesn't matter. The worry is the same. And lately, more and more o
Article
Nomi.AI built the perfect partner. It remembers everything, never says no, and according to its own paying users.......keeps trying to strangle them.****Trigger Warning****This article discusses violence and abuse.Support if you need Australia , 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 13 11 14UK , Refuge National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247, Samaritans 116 123US , National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233, 988 Suicide & Crisis LifelineInternational , findahelpline.com Last week,
Article
***This piece describes self-harm and coercion. If you are worried about a young person, please reach out to a helpline or professional*** In May, in the Netherlands, a seventeen-year-old girl the world knows only as Dana was pulled from her bed in the dark. Six armed officers stood over her and her mother with their guns drawn. Two more moved through the house. Someone had told police there was a hostage inside, held at gunpoint.It was a lie. Days earlier, Dana had done one thing to deserve t
Article
Somewhere in Nairobi, a woman sits at a desk with nothing in her pockets. No phone, no bag beneath the chair, nothing she could carry out when the shift ends. On the screen in front of her, a clip runs for less than a minute. She tags it. A credit card on a kitchen bench. She tags that. A child in a bath. A prescription label. A person undressing, filmed from a bedside table by glasses left face-up and still recording. She tags them all and moves on.There are dozens of people in that room doing
Article
Earlier this week, Meta announced that people could generate images in Meta AI by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts they wanted to reference. In plain English, that meant someone could bring a public Instagram account into an AI image prompt and use public photos from that account as part of a new AI-generated image. After public backlash, Meta updated its announcement on July 10, 2026, saying the feature “missed the mark” and is “no longer available” (Meta Newsroom). That sounds like go
Article
A follow-up to “Instagram just changed the rules on your photos.” that has been read by 100K+ of you across various platforms. You can read it here for background.Meta has announced something in the last 24hrs called Muse Spark 1.1. Forget the name, because here are the most common questions I have been asked over the past few days and why it all matters. Question 1: Kirra, does this happen on Facebook and WhatsApp too, or is it just Instagram?Yes. It does. Not in exactly the same shape on eve
Article
A new Meta AI feature lets people turn public Instagram photos into AI-generated images. For a school, that is not a creative novelty. It is a safeguarding, consent and reputation issue - and the fix takes five minutes.Instagram has quietly introduced a new AI image feature that belongs on every school's and parents radar today. Meta's new model, Muse Image, lets people @mention Instagram accounts inside Meta AI prompts, so public photos from those profiles can be pulled in to generate brand-ne
Article
I learned something new a few days ago, promptly forgot about it and then this morning I was poking around in a settings menu looking for something else , and there it was. I showed my partner, mostly as a “huh, look at this” and before I’d even finished explaining, he’d put his phone in my hand and said, “Quick. Do it to mine.” A simple setting change transforms any iPhone into something that feels a lot more like a dumb phone without buying another device. Nobody has to be talked into wanting
