New plans to stop children taking, sharing or viewing nude images Source:UK Government News

 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to establish additional protections for children online at  the UK Tech Conference and Exhibition on Munday 8th June 2026. 

The plans would prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing naked images on their devices. New requirments would be placed on Apple and Google to activate their built-in features or implement technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children.

The decision to take such action was, in part, a result of research undertaken by the Internet Watch Foundation. Their data indicated that 91% of online child sexual abuse reports recorded in 2024 contained self-generated content from children themselves and the average child now views pornography by age 13. 

Sexting can directly lead to sexploitation and evidence shows that this activity has reached very high levels of activity in recent years.

Read the full story here. 

 

 

Social media on trial: Four important cases to watch Source: BBC news

 

 
This BBC report provides a useful insight into the four major court cases currently taking place within a landscape which include, companies like Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, Google, owner of Youtube, and Snapchat, along with relatively newer platforms like TikTok, Discord and social gaming platform Roblox, are facing thousands of lawsuits in the US over claims that they have instead harmed users, children in particular.

The cases include one in California which includes allegations from more than 1,000 school districts across the US. The schools accuse Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok of being intentionally designed to be addictive, which has allegedly harmed children mentally and emotionally through their excessive use of platforms. 

A second case also in California, is focussed on Meta and Instagram. The complainants demand that Meta better prevent users under 13 years old from using its platforms and remove data it has previously collected from underage users, along with a host of other changes.

The third, against Roblox and Discord, was brought by a 13 year old boy who claims that he had been groomed and solicited by an individual who was arrested for his crimes which affected more that 24 children.  

Finally not about children, is a case brought by an Australian billionaire who sued Meta over the company's alleged failure to combat scam advertisements tricking Australians into fake investments that allegedly proliferated on Facebook using his name and likeness.

 For as long time these companies , and others have considered children to their future subscribers and have tried every trick to draw them in and keep them as apart of their user-base. The reason is that these new users become adults whose data has value.

There will be more of these cases in the coming years as governments try to find ways to keep children, and others, safe online.

To read the full article here. 

 

 

 

Children report record numbers of online sextortion attempts Source: Care

 

Report Remove is a service run jointly by NSPCC and the Internet Watch Foundation has reported a 34% increase in reports of blackmail attempts on children in the past year.

The service encourages children and young people to report intimate images of themselves online and there has been a 34% rise in reports of blackmail attempts over the previous year.  

The service works by producing a ‘hash’ code that acts like a digital fingerprint, that can be shared shared with social media platforms to get the images taken down without directly sharing the images themselves. Of the 1,894 total reports by under-18s to the Report Remove service in 2025, 1,175 were so explicit as to qualify as child sexual abuse material.

Read the full story here. 

 

 

Social media as bad for children as smoking, British doctors say Source: Brtish Medical Journal

 

British doctors have responded to the UK government consultation on the possible ban on Social Media for under 16 year olds by saying that  'Social media ranks alongside smoking as a danger to children'.

The report also refers to a statement made in the report that   "There can be few issues which have united clinicians so resoundingly ​in recent years as the impact that unfettered exposure to tech and devices is currently having ​on children and young people's health," 

More than half of 132 doctors surveyed saw at least one case of health harm that could ​be related to tech and devices every week, and over a third saw evidence of harm ​multiple times a week.\

 

The report will almost certainly have a significant impact on the outcome of the consultation and decisions about changes to UK law to deal with the issue are imminent.

 

Read the full story here. 

 

 

Nearly in one in five UK girls receive unwanted images online, poll finds Source: The Guardian

 

Research undertaken by the charity Barnardos, found that almost one in five girls in the UK receive persistent, unwanted images online. In its survey of 4000 young people a quarter of girls had been called degrading names and one in seven had been asked to send nude images of themselves folowing contacts online.

Barnardo’s frontline practitioners reported that they were seeing more children affected by misogynistic content online, and an increase in child-on-child sexual abuse or children displaying problematic sexual behaviour, compared with last year. 

Read the full report here.