‘Stranger Danger’ tops parents’ online gaming worries Source: UK OFCOM

 

This report from the UK Telecoms regulator OFCOM covering concerns of parents regarding strangers communicating with their children through online games

This comes as more than half (55%) of children who game online say they play with people they have never met offline at least sometimes, while one in five (20%) do so all or most of the time they play.

Talking to strangers (64%) ranks ahead of parental concerns about bullying by other players (60%), seeing inappropriate content such as violence, bad language or disturbing material (59%), and pressure to make in-game purchases (51%).

OFCOM has launched a programme to support parents to help keep their children safe online. The programme, called 'Power Up' is available on the OFCOM site here. 

Read the full report here. 

 

 

 

Parental Screen Time and Children’s Screen Habits Source: Digital Parenting Lab

 

 

Not a News item as such but this Blog post does make interesting reading. The post explores the issues faced by parents in the modern internet age, beset as we are, by mobile devices, interactive games and social media.

The post discusses how typical parents use mobile devices to babysit their children or as rewards for certain behaviour. It goes on to consider the perils of too much screen time and impact of too much time spent by young children looking at screens.

The blog post invites a continued debate about such issues and encourage parents to discuss issues with others faced with the same issues and concerns.

 Read the full post here. 

 

Children's online feeds telling them 'how they should look and behave' Source: Sky News

 

A survey undertaken by Plan International UK, a charity which works to advance girls' equality would suggest that more than two-thirds of children surveyed have regularly seen content telling them how to look, dress and behave - and which careers and interests to pursue, according to research.

A charity questioned 1,440 seven to 17-year-olds and found seven in 10 girls (70%) and more than two-thirds of boys (67%) encountered such messages online.  Six in 10 (62%) young people also said they wanted social media companies to do more to remove harmful content.

The charity set up six fake TikTok accounts and found content for 13-16-year-olds became "clearly gendered" within just 20 minutes and could expose kids to "increasingly specific and harmful gendered content" after less than two hours of scrolling. 

The report describes how messages and content target girls with messages about how they should look and how they should live. Such pressure on young minds sets up unrealistic challenges to change the way they look and live.

Read more about this story here. 

 

Criminal gangs blackmailing schools with deepfake child sex abuse images at ‘shocking’ scale, experts say Source: The Independent

 

A report in the Independent News Paper describes another new attack on children in our schools by producing sexualised images of children from the schools and using them to extort ransom payments to prevent the images from being published online.

The report goes on to suggest that this is not occasional instances  of these attacks but a growing wave of them. Nearly half of headteachers have reported pupil images being used as part of harmful acts including extortion or blackmail threats, and more that half of them reported concerns about images on the school website could be used as a source for the original images.

Criminals will always seek an alternative to their initial tactics and now that such things are being tightened up by UK laws this seems to be an alternative way to keep up their criminal activities.

Read the full story here. 

 

Instagram teen accounts still show suicide content, study claims Source: BBC News

 

Research carried out by the US research centre Cybersecurity for Democracy  on behalf of child safety groups including the Molly Rose Foundation have reported that their investigations show that Instagram's tools designed to protect teenagers from harmful content are failing to stop them from seeing suicide and self-harm posts.

Researchers also said the social media platform, owned by Meta, encouraged children "to post content that received highly sexualised comments from adults".

The testing, by child safety groups and cyber researchers, found 30 out of 47 safety tools for teens on Instagram were "substantially ineffective or no longer exist".

Meta has disputed the research and its findings, saying its protections have led to teens seeing less harmful content on Instagram.

Read the full report here.