Online safety laws have failed to protect children in UK, Ofcom admits Source: The Guardian

 

The Guardian newspaper reports that the UK Online Safety Laws, designed to protect children online are failing. The report states that the regulations failed to limit the proportion of children suffering harm from social media, the UK’s online regulator has admitted, in an assessment branded “staggering” by campaigners.

OFCOM, the UK regulator for reported that 'at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025'. 

This makes for disappointing reading  but it is clear that governments can only ngo so far in a fairly unregulated world. Once one site or online service is dealt with others pop up to replace them. 

It is true that government action in a number of countries have applied pressure to some major players to take more responsibility for what appears on their platforms their actions have not been sufficient to solve the problems that exist for children online. 

Parents clearly still have a critical roll in keeping their families safe bu monitoring what they are doing, who they are communicating with, and building family relationships which ensure that children share their concerns and what they are doing online.

Read the full story 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. 

 

The internet is not safe for children, say UK police bosses Source: EuroNews

 

The UK Government's National Crime Agency Director , Graeme  Biggar  made this statement  “Our assessment is clear: the online environment in its current form is not safe for children. The industry response has been too slow, while the problem has been getting worse. Enough is enough” 

He added: “Either the tech companies must effectively stop children using those features or make them safe. If they do not, the Government should ban them for U16s.”

NPCC's ,Gavin Stephens, also pointed out in the statement that the online space at the moment had become “something of a wild west”, where both regulation and law were lagging far behind advancing technology.

One could reflect that the UK has done a lot to bring some sort of sanity to the situation through its OFCOM regulations regarding the responsibilities of the Tech companies.

All this said, the two agencies are not arguing for an outright ban on social media and internet access for young people. They hold the view that the benefits to young people outweigh the disadvantages. They want the Tech companies to increase their scrutiny of online communications and increase the level of security for children.

Read the fully story here. 

 

Beyond Borders: U.S. and Australian Families on Online Safety, Screen Use, and the Digital Lives of Kids Source: Family Safety Online Institute (FOSI)

 

Although not UK referenced data this report from FOSI does give an insight into how children and parents view different aspects of the online world on young people. 

Not surprisingly there are some differences about how each view their experiences online and the report picks out some of these differences in the data they collected.  The data provides an insight into  Australian children’s and parent’s perceptions of online life during a time when children’s digital well-being was at the forefront of Australian public discussion – before and after the Australian social media ban took effect.

FOSI writers identified what they considered a striking difference of children reported doing most online activities listed at a significantly higher rate than parents reported for their children.

Read the full report here. 

New evidence on online harms affecting children Source: Source: Youth Justice Board

 

The Youth Justice Board (YJB) has today published a comprehensive new 'Evidence and Insights Pack' on Online Harms Affecting Children. 

The Evidence and Insights Pack brings together the latest research, data, and practice examples from across England and Wales to improve our understanding of the risks children face online and how we safeguard them in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

The evidence pack highlights that while online platforms are central to children’s lives, they expose them to severe, overlapping risks:

• Children face a wide range of digital harms, including cyberbullying, sexual abuse, radicalisation, and exploitation.
• Exposure to harmful content and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images have become increasingly normalised among children, disproportionately affecting girls.
• Many children who engage in problematic online behaviours have complex needs or are themselves victims of abuse.
• Inadequate platform design features and a lack of digital literacy among adults significantly increases risk and hinder effective safeguarding.
• Online harms have long-lasting impacts on wellbeing and, for some children, are directly linked to involvement in offline violence.

 Access to Evidence and Insights pack here.

 

Social Media Was Banned in Australia for Kids Under 16. Months Later, More Than 85% of Them Are Still Online Source: People.com

 

The UK's recent actions to manage social media access for children under 16 followed the similar actions taken by the Australian government. This report would suggest that legislation is not an easy option in controlling access to social media as it would appear.

The report suggests that after three months of the start of the ban a significant proportion of the target age group are still online engaging in social media activities. The report isn't anti legislation but it states that it could take a decade for the intention of the law take full effect.

The article also includes a statement from the UK's NSPCC  (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) which states that “It's evident from this research that a ban alone will not keep all children safe from harm online,”

Parents must play a part in the protection of their children and monitoring such activity on a child;s device is still an effective way to add a further layer of protection which is closer to home.

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. 

 

 

Instagram boosts privacy and parental control on teen accounts Source: BBC News

 

 

In Spetmber of 2024  Instagram changed the way the site worked for teenagers by introducing their new “teen accounts”. These new accounts, which function to the age of 18, were initially made available to users in the UK, US , Canada and Austrailia. Children aged 13 to 15 will only be able to adjust the settings by adding a parent or guardian to their account.  See the original story here.

Research undertaken on the effectiveness of the changes towards the end of 2025 indictaed that up to 64% of safety tools are ineffective or missing.

Key Findings on Performance:

• Mixed Effectiveness: Independent testing by child safety groups found that 30 out of 47 safety tools were "substantially ineffective or no longer exist".
• Content and Contact Risks: Researchers reported that accounts still accessed harmful content, including suicide/self-harm, and were exposed to sexualized comments from adults.
• Algorithmic Issues: Studies suggest algorithms still recommend inappropriate content or accounts, contradicting safety promises.
• Parental Control Usage: While parental supervision features exist, reports indicate they are underutilized, with some parents unaware of how to leverage them  

In February 2026 Instagram announced parents using Instagram's child supervision tools would soon receive alerts if their teen repeatedly searches for suicide or self-harm related terms on the platform. Whilst this sounds a good step forward it is questionable whther it will prove effective and leaves a lot of potential dangers to still get through. Time will tell.

A more concerning  issue for parents must be that if they have to impliment this for Instagram, they will then have to set up similar protections for each product as they become available which is a daunting prospect if you add gaming into the app soup of mobile device apps.

More worrying still, is the view expressed by the UK regulator OFCOM, that a major problem is the actual' willingness of parents to intervene to keep their children safe online.  Sir Nick Clegg, speaking for META said: “One of the things we do find… is that even when we build these controls, parents don’t use them.”

Read the latest new story on this issue here. 

Two options - Help parents to impliment these controls through evidence of their effectiveness and support. Alternatively put all of their trust in governments regulating the tech industried alone. Whilst the latter will have a significant impact it ignores the key dynamic of promoting the parent child relationship to ensure that childrens online activities are monitored effectively. 

This whole argument is what inderpins the current project of  The CyberTrust's Internet Family Monitoring Project which can be found here.

 

UK Social Media Ban for Under-16s: Implications and Implementation Challenges Source: Bloomsbery Intelligence and Security Institute

 

The House of Lords voted 261 to 150 on 21 January 2026 to amend the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, requiring platforms to implement effective age assurance measures blocking under-16s within 12 months. This part of the process by UKG to make the decision whether new legislation will be brought into law later this year.

The report takes a deep look at the various aspects of the issue which many will already be aware of. This follows on from Austrilias decision to ban social media to under sixteen yoru olds and looks at the technical issues and challanged that such bans uncover.

An aspect that most arguements do not cover are the potemtial down sides of such legislation.

One section headed 'Digital Preparedness and the Voting Age Paradox' makes very interesting reading. The introductory paragraph reads;

"A blanket ban risks leaving young people unprepared for digital environments they will inevitably encounter. Bans will likely deprive teenagers of opportunities to develop digital literacy skills by navigating online environments gradually and with guidance. Shielding children entirely from social media can delay essential conversations about online risks while hampering their ability to build competencies early."

Such considerations are a vital part of the debate. the last thing we want is to have a large number of teenagers who lack the experience of the online world. They need to develop the skills of communicating online with other friends whilst they are likely to be more receptive to advice and guidanced of adult role models.

Read the full report here.

Concerns rise over online harm after data reveals scale of sexualised images createdSource:SWL Londoner

 

The AI tool Grok is estimated to have generated approximately 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 that appear to depict children. The images were created following the launch of a new image editing feature launched by Elon Musk's company on 29th December 2025. 

Research undertaken by CCDH, (Centre for Countering Digital Hate in the US), also noted that 29% of sexualised images of children identified in their sample of 20,000 remained on X as of 15 January. 

The research identified approimately 23,000 sexualised images of children, 3 million sexualised images overall and that an image was created every 1 minute and 41 seconds during the period from launch to the 15th January. 

Elon Musk, owner and creator of Grok, first denied knowledge of the images and then defended the site by initially blaming users and defending free speech. Grok finally implemented technical measures to prevent users from editing images of real people in revealing clothing. They also limited image generation capabilities to paid subscribers to add a layer of accountability.

Grok is now under investigation by OFCOM in the UK.

I would have thought that anyone creating an artificial intelligence tool would be intelligent enough to realise that their tool could be misused and would have dealt with that potential in advance of launching a product. We all know that the major tech companies are in constant competition to grab users of their platform and then monetise that audience.   

Read the full story here.

Read the full research report here.

 

 

Story:AI becoming ‘child sexual abuse machine’ adding to ‘dangerous’ record levels of online abuse, IWF warns Source: Internet Watch Foundation

New data from the IWF raises serious concerns about AI. They start their report with this unnerving statement;

 "AI tools will become “child sexual abuse machines” without urgent action, as “extreme” AI videos fuel record levels of child sexual abuse material found online by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)."

The data, published on January 16 shows 2025 was the worst year on record for online child sexual abuse material found by its analysts, with increasing levels of photo-realistic AI material contributing to the “dangerous” levels.

The UK government, along with other governments, are undertaking urgent discussions with law enforcement, the tech industry and AI specilists to determne what can be done. The platform 'X' (Formerly Twitter) has already fallen foul of regulators when it was discovered that its AI tools were being used to remove clothing from children allowing them to be publsihed online.

Read the full report here.

Story:High screen time limits vocabulary in toddlers, research finds Source BBC News

Parents of under-fives in England are to be offered official advice on how long their children should spend watching TV or looking at computer screens.

Government research  shows that about 98% of children under two were watching screens on a daily basis - with parents, teachers and nursery staff saying youngsters were finding it harder to hold conversations or concentrate on learning.

Children with the highest screen time - around five hours a day - reportedly could say significantly fewer words than those at the other end of the scale who watched for around 44 minutes.

The full report is available from the news item on the BBC website.

The Cybertrust's Family Internet montoring project is clear that starting a discussion with children about online use and managing their time should start early so that it become part of their normal day. 

Giving a child a phone to keep it occupied or to avoid parenting obligations puts children at serious risk and that risk grows over time unless a more moderate usage habit is formed early in life. Our project has published four videos about products that help with monitoring screen time and setting limits.

Read the full news item here. 

 

 

Story:More than 800,000 young children seeing social media content 'designed to hook adults', figures show Source: SKY News

 

 

Research evidence collected by The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ)  found that almost four in 10 parents of a three to five year-old reported that their child uses at least one social media app or site.

With roughly 2.2 million children in this age group as of 2024, the CSJ said this suggests there could be 814,000 users of social media between three and five years old, a rise of around 220,000 users from the year before.

As of 10th December 2025 the UK government require social media platforms will have to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from having a social media account, in effect blocking them from platforms such as Meta's Instagram, TikTok and Snap's Snapchat.

The report suggests that parents need to be made aware of the risks and how to deal with them. There is plenty of evidence that a large number of parents sign their children up to Whatsapp, for family comunications and Tik Tok as they think the site is all about dancing and they cannot preceive what risks there might be.

Monitoring what children are doing online and what topics they are searching for is an opportunity to trigger those important conversations that need to take place between parent and children. Open discussion and sharing of concerns, both ways,  will help to keep everyone safe.

Read the full story here.