I have spent a long time on this blog writing about the people and the platforms you need to protect your children from. That is important and always will be. Today I want to do something a little different, because occasionally you find someone online who gives you genuine hope, and I think hope is also worth sharing.

I have been following a man called Bernie Bernard for a while now. His Instagram account is @_whatmakesaman_. If you have a son, a grandson, a nephew, or a teenage boy in your life at all, I want you to know who he is.

This is not a sponsored post, nobody asked me to write this. I am writing it because I genuinely believe Bernie is the kind of online presence we desperately need more of right now, and because parents need to hear about him.

Why Online Safety Isn’t Just About Predators

In my opinion, we are in a crisis when it comes to the male role models young boys are encountering online. And I say that as someone who has spent years looking at what happens when children are failed by the adults around them.

A 2025 report by Male Allies UK, The Voice of the Boys,1 surveyed 1,032 boys aged 11 to 16 across England, Scotland and Wales. It found that 81% of them don’t feel there are enough spaces to be a boy today. 72% don’t have more than one person who knows them really well. 79% aren’t even sure what masculinity means.

Whilst those boys are looking for an answer to that question, the algorithm is ready and waiting with its own.

The same research found that in a typical classroom of boys, at least 24 of them will have been exposed to Andrew Tate’s content. The manosphere isn’t a fringe issue. It is sitting in the middle of your son’s feed right now, dressed up as self-improvement, telling him that strength means dominance, that vulnerability is weakness, and that women who won’t comply deserve contempt.

I have seen firsthand where that ideology can lead when it takes root. I will not share the details because that is not what this post is about. What I will say is that the boys who end up in the worst situations are almost always boys who had nobody telling them a different story.

Bernie Bernard tells a different story.

Who Is Bernie Bernard?

Andrew ‘Bernie’ Bernard is a professional speaker, an author, a cancer survivor, a husband and a dad. He is also one of the most quietly powerful voices on masculinity I have come across.

He has spent over twenty years working with young people in schools. And for the past decade, his work has been driven by something deeply personal. Bernie’s sister, Sarah, was murdered by her controlling partner in February 2012.2 He turned that loss into a life’s mission.

His programme is called What Makes a Man? He estimates he has spoken to over 165,000 young people, teachers, youth workers, sports teams and employees.3 He is a TEDx speaker.4 He has written The Ladder, a careers book for young people, published by Crown House.5 He is an ambassador for Ask for Angela, the national scheme that helps people signal they need help when they feel unsafe.6

He is currently working on a second book about helping schools tackle unhealthy masculinity in young men.

But what makes him worth following on Instagram isn’t the credentials. It’s the way he shows up.

What Good Male Role Models Look Like Online

Bernie posts without pretension. He is funny, warm, and direct. He does not shy away from calling out the nonsense that passes for male empowerment in the manosphere.

He talks about what healthy masculinity actually looks like, not as a lecture, but as a conversation. He talks about empathy, about building good relationships, about the difference between confidence and arrogance, about what coercive control looks like before it escalates.

One of the things I admire most is that he doesn’t just tell young men what they are doing wrong. He said it himself:

Telling young people what they are doing wrong hardly ever stopped them wanting to do those things.7

Instead, he opens up space to think and he asks questions. What makes a man? What decisions are you making right now that will define the rest of your life?

He is also honest about his own life in a way that models the openness we want young men to feel is possible. A cancer diagnosis. Family grief. The idea that being a man does not mean being unmoved.

From where I sit, he is actively taking on the ‘Masculinity Influencers’ and ‘Gymbros’ of this world, not by screaming into the void, but by being the alternative. The voice in the room that says: there is another version of this, and it is better for everyone, including you.

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Why This Sits Within Online Safety

My lane is online child safety and this sits firmly within it. Because the biggest online safety risk for boys right now is not just predators in the traditional sense. It is ideology, it is a pipeline that starts with a funny video and ends somewhere much darker.

The best protection against that pipeline is not blocking and filtering, it is better content, better conversations and better role models. If your son is going to be on Instagram anyway, and he almost certainly is, then who he follows matters. Who lands in his feed shapes what he thinks is normal.

Bernie landing in his feed is a good thing, trust me.

What You Can Do Today

This one is very simple.

Follow @_whatmakesaman_ on Instagram (Substack also ) and have a look at his content yourself first. Show a post to your son, or just mention his name and let curiosity do the rest.

If you are a teacher or a DSL, look into his school programmes. His What Makes a Man? sessions and his Domestic Violence: Sarah’s Legacy keynote are designed exactly for the audiences you work with. His website is innovativeenterprise.co.uk.

At home, you do not need to make this a Serious Conversation. You can just say, I saw this bloke online and thought what he had to say was interesting, what do you think? Open the door and let them walk through it themselves.

That is always the basis of what I write. Not surveillance, not control, just open, honest, and non-judgmental conversation. Bernie models that from the other side of the screen.

A Final Word

I don’t have children of my own. Colleen and I have two angel babies who never got to come home, and there is not a day that goes by that doesn’t enter my mind.

But I care deeply about the children who are here. The boys who are scrolling right now, looking for an answer to a question nobody has taught them how to ask. The young men who are one algorithm away from being told that anger is strength and women are the enemy.

If I can do one small thing through this blog, it is occasionally to point you towards the people who are doing the real work. Bernie Bernard is doing the real work.

Go follow him. Share this with someone who needs it and if you are a parent who is worried about what your son is watching online, know that you are not alone in that worry, and there are people building the antidote.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain. Or to make a one off donation go to my Just Giving page.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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I do not charge for what I do and never will!

Every guide I write, every session I deliver to schools and organisations, every newsletter that lands in your inbox. All of it is free.

Every penny from any paid subscriptions goes directly to Childline. That has been my ethos from the beginning, and it is not changing.

But people ask, organisations ask and free subscribers have asked. Until now my answer has been a slightly awkward version of, go make a donation in my name, I don't really have another way, except paid subscriptions.

Now I do!

Why a JustGiving Page?

A few weeks ago, an organisation I had delivered online safety sessions for came back and asked about the next block of training, they asked again how much I charge. I have had that conversation more than once over the years.

The honest answer has always been that I do not want payment. It would fundamentally change what this is and what my mission is. But it also felt wrong to just say no and leave it there, as if the only options are pay me or give nothing.

The JustGiving page solves that issue for me. If an organisation wants to recognise the work, they can donate directly to Childline, no invoice and no awkwardness. The money goes directly to where it should go and it is not only for organisations.

For Free Subscribers

If you have read something here that helped you start a difficult conversation with your child, or you have shared a guide with a school, or something I have written landed at the right moment and you want to do something practical with that, this is how.

If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. Every penny of that goes directly to Childline, twice a year, without exception. The JustGiving page is for everyone else. If a monthly or yearly commitment does not work for you right now but you still want to give something, this is how you do it. One-off, no strings, no renewal reminder.

There is no suggested amount, no target and most importantly no pressure. Whatever feels right for you.

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The Cost of This Work

I spent eight years in Digital Forensics with the RAF Police. I analysed over a million images in that time. Roughly a quarter of them were criminal. 1

I did that without any psychological support. No counselling, no debrief, no one checking in. I was eventually medically discharged with Complex PTSD in 2019. 2

I started Cyber Safety Guy because I needed that to mean something. Not to process it, I have other spaces for that. But to make sure the knowledge I carry from those years actually reaches the people who can use it. Parents. Teachers. Safeguarding professionals.

I do not take a wage from this. Not as a badge, but because the moment this becomes about money, it becomes something different.

I have seen enough of what happens to children when the adults around them are not paying attention to the risks online.

How to Support

justgiving.com/page/CSG-Childline

No amount suggested. No deadline. If the work has meant something to you, this is how you can pass that on.

Childline are there 24/7 to pick up the phone to a child in need, let's make sure there's always someone to answer the call.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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UK Social Media Ban: What the Under-16 Law Actually Covers

Today is a significant moment for child online safety in the UK.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood at Downing Street this morning and announced that children under 16 will be banned from social media.

TikTok | Instagram | Snapchat | YouTube | Facebook | X

All named, all in scope. The government says legislation will be before Parliament before Christmas, with the ban coming into force around spring 2027.1

I have been campaigning alongside parents, teachers and safeguarding professionals on this issue for years. So yes, I welcome this, but I want to be open with you about what this is, what it is not, and what still needs to happen.

Because a headline is not the same as a solution.

What the UK Under-16 Social Media Ban Actually Covers

The platforms named in the announcement are Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are not included.2

That distinction is important. Messaging apps carry their own risks, but the government has focused its first move on public social media platforms, where algorithmic content delivery does the most damage.

The legislation will also go “a bit further” than Australia’s comparable ban, which came into force in December 2025. The UK says it will introduce what it describes as “world-leading blocks on harmful functions such as livestreaming and stranger communication with children.”3

That second part is one most people have not picked up on yet. Gaming platforms and livestreaming sites are explicitly in scope. Strangers contacting children through those channels will also be restricted. If that gets implemented properly, it is genuinely significant.

The Part Nobody Is Talking About: Gaming and Livestreaming

I am aware of many cases where the initial contact between an offender and a child happened on a gaming platform, not a dark corner of the internet, not a specialist grooming site, but a mainstream game.

Voice chat in Fortnite. Private messages in Roblox. Discord links dropped into game lobbies.

The majority of grooming cases now begin on platforms that parents consider safe. Games, YouTube and livestreams. The announcement that these will be brought into scope alongside the social media platforms is the most important line in today’s news that very few people will recognise.

A Welcome First Step, But Enforcement Is the Real Test

Australia introduced this ban in December 2025. Children are still on these platforms.4 Age verification at scale is hard. The technology does not yet exist in a form that works reliably without creating significant privacy risks for adults.

The UK government has given tech companies a three-month ultimatum to implement device-level safety software. Failure to comply will result in legislative penalties. Starmer was direct, if platforms resist, he will fight back.

That language is encouraging, but I have seen this film before. The Online Safety Act received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Protection of Children Codes only came into force in July 2025. Nearly two years between law and enforcement. Eight years from initial proposal to legislation. In my world, words are cheap, action is the only thing that matters.

The platforms have the resources to delay, lobby and water things down. Starmer acknowledged this himself, describing a tendency toward “learned helplessness” when it comes to tech regulation. He is right and it will require sustained political will to resist it.

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What This Means for Platforms: Finally Some Accountability

These platforms did not accidentally become harmful to children. They were built to maximise engagement. Infinite scroll, algorithmic amplification of emotionally charged content, notification systems designed to pull children back in and features that reward attention over wellbeing. None of that happened by accident, it happened by design.

Internal Meta research, leaked in 2021 and confirmed in court proceedings, showed the company knew Instagram was harming teenage girls and continued anyway.5 TikTok’s algorithm has been shown to serve self-harm and eating disorder content to newly registered teen accounts within minutes.

A ban puts pressure on platforms. It does not excuse them from what they have already done, or from the ongoing responsibility to make their products safer. Accountability and a ban are not alternatives. We need both!

What Parents and Teachers Should Do Right Now

For parents:

This ban will not come into force until spring 2027 at the earliest. Your child is on these platforms right now. Use the conversation that today’s news has opened up. Ask them what they use, what they enjoy and what they have seen that worried them. The ban will not replace that conversation, nothing should ever replace that

For teachers and DSLs:

Update your safeguarding knowledge to include gaming and livestreaming platforms. The announcement today puts those platforms in scope, but the risks exist now. Review your school’s online safety policy to ensure it reflects where children are actually spending their time, not just where we assume they are.

For everyone:

The free guides at guides.cybersafetyguy.com cover the platforms your children are most likely using, with plain-English parental controls for each one. Use them today, not in 2027.

The Bigger Picture

The UK joins Australia, Canada, Brazil and Indonesia in moving to restrict under-16s’ access to social media.6 This is a global shift. Governments around the world are arriving at the same conclusion, the platforms cannot be trusted to self-regulate when it comes to children.

Esther Ghey, whose daughter Brianna was murdered in 2023 by two teenagers who had accessed harmful content online, said today that this ban would “potentially save some lives.” She has campaigned with extraordinary dignity for years to get to this moment. Whatever questions remain about enforcement, this announcement is, in part, because of her.

This is a good first step, a meaningful one. But it is a first step. The test will be enforcement, and that is where the platforms will push back hardest.

Keep watching, keep asking questions and keep talking to your children.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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What Is Wizz and Why Should Parents Care About Child Safety?

Your child has an app on their phone that you have probably never heard of. It is called Wizz. It is a social networking app with a swipe-based interface that lets teenagers match and chat with strangers. And it has been described, in safety reports, investigations and news headlines, as ‘Tinder for kids.’ 1

That label is not sensationalism; it is a description of what the app actually does.

Wizz allows users aged 13 and over to create a profile, upload photos, and swipe through other users’ profiles to find a match. The app is designed to connect people who do not know each other. Its own marketing says it helps you meet ‘like-minded peers all over the country.’ But the safeguards that are meant to keep adults away from children have repeatedly failed. The app has been linked to grooming, sextortion, and child sexual exploitation in multiple countries.

The reason I write about apps like this is not to frighten parents. It is to make sure they have the information they need before it is needed.

How Does Wizz Work and What Are the Child Safety Risks?

Wizz functions as a dating app repurposed for teenagers. Users swipe through profiles and can match and message with anyone the platform connects them to. The company says it groups users by age. The evidence says that it does not work reliably.2

In one widely reported investigation, a safety researcher created an account as a minor and was matched with adults. Law enforcement agencies in multiple countries have documented cases where adults created fake teen profiles and used the app to make contact with children. In 2024, both Apple and Google temporarily removed Wizz from their app stores following reports of widespread sextortion. The app has since returned.3

Here is the pattern I recognise from my time in DFIR, because it is the same one predators use across almost every platform:

• They create a profile that looks like a peer. Similar age, similar interests, familiar language.

• They build trust quickly. Compliments, flattery and making the child feel seen and understood.

• They move the conversation off-platform. ‘Add me on Snapchat.’ ‘Let’s chat on WhatsApp.’ This gets them away from any moderation Wizz has.

• Once off-platform, the manipulation escalates. Requests for images, then threats to share them, that is sextortion.

In a poll of 500 English-speaking Wizz users, 40% reported being sextorted on the app. 77% of those victims were minors. Some victims reported being targeted within minutes of joining.4

That last part is the one that should concern you the most, “within minutes”.

What Is Sextortion and Why Is It Happening on Wizz?

Sextortion is when someone uses intimate images, or the threat of them, to coerce or control another person. On platforms like Wizz, it typically works like this, a predator posing as a teen builds a connection with a child, requests an intimate image, receives it, and then threatens to share it with the child’s friends, family or school unless they comply with further demands. Those demands are usually more images or money.

It is a criminal offence in the UK. But by the time it happens, the damage to the child has already begun, fear, shame and isolation. All of the things that keep children silent.

The age-verification system on Wizz has been tested and found to be lacking. A 20-person moderation team reviewing flagged content is not a safety net for an app with millions of users, it is barely a sticking plaster. Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has the power to fine platforms up to 10% of their global revenue for child safety failures. Wizz should be aware of that.

But platform accountability is Ofcom’s job. Your job, as a parent or teacher, is to know this app exists and to act before your child becomes a statistic.

Warning Signs: How to Know If Your Child Is at Risk on Wizz

You will not always know what your child is doing online. That is the reality, but there are behaviours worth paying attention to:

• Protecting their screen from you with unusual intensity, particularly around messaging apps.

• Mood changes after time online. Anxious, withdrawn, or distressed in ways they cannot explain to you.

• New ‘friends’ they are reluctant to talk about, or whose name keeps coming up but who nobody seems to know in real life.

• Requests for money, or unexplained payments on shared accounts. Sextortion sometimes involves financial demands.

• Receiving gifts or money without a clear explanation of where it came from.

• Hiding app downloads. Children who want to use apps they know are not approved will sometimes put them inside a folder or behind a lock screen app.

None of these alone is proof that something is wrong. But any of them, combined with access to Wizz, is worth a calm, non-accusatory conversation.

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What Parents Can Do Right Now: Online Safety Actions for Wizz

1. Check your child’s phone for the Wizz app. It uses an orange icon. If it is there, do not panic. Have a conversation.

2. Talk, do not interrogate. ‘I read something about this app and wanted to make sure you knew what to look out for’ is very different from ‘show me your phone right now.’

3. Explain what sextortion is in age-appropriate terms. Children who understand the tactic are far better placed to recognise it and resist it.

4. Make it clear they will not be in trouble if something has already happened. The shame spiral is what predators rely on. Remove it.

5. Use parental controls on the device to restrict app downloads by age rating. Both Apple’s Screen Time and Android’s Family Link allow this.

6. If you believe something has already happened, report it. Contact the police on 101, or report directly to CEOP (ceop.police.uk). You can also contact Childline on 0800 1111.

What Teachers and DSLs Need to Know About Wizz in Schools

If you are a teacher or Designated Safeguarding Lead reading this, Wizz is worth adding to your awareness list now. The app is gaining traction with secondary school students, and the sextortion risk is particularly acute for boys aged 15 to 17, who make up the majority of reported victims.

Under Keeping Children Safe in Education 2024, DSLs have a duty to be aware of online risks that students may be exposed to outside school. Wizz is one of them.

Practical steps for schools:

• Brief your PSHE team on swipe-based stranger apps as a category of risk, not just Wizz specifically. The platform landscape changes. The mechanism does not.

• Add Wizz to your online safety curriculum discussion for Year 9 and above.

• Share this article with parents via your next newsletter or Parentpay communication.

• Update your online safety policy to reference apps that connect minors with strangers as a safeguarding concern.

If a student discloses something has happened on Wizz, follow your standard child protection referral pathway. CEOP, local authority, police. The online element does not change the process.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Something unusual happened today, and I want to walk through it carefully because if you catch only one of the two headlines, you will miss the point of both.

This morning at WWDC 2026 in Cupertino, Apple announced a package of new child safety features coming to iOS 27. Ask to Browse, which requires children to request parental approval before visiting new websites in Safari. An expanded Communication Safety system that now detects graphic violence and nudity. A redesigned Screen Time with age-based daily limit recommendations developed alongside child development experts. Scheduling tools to control which apps are available at different points in the day. New developer APIs to help app-makers build age-appropriate experiences.1

Worth acknowledging and well worth setting up when iOS 27 arrives in the autumn.

A few hours later, at London Tech Week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum. Introduce device-level controls that prevent children from taking, sending, and receiving nude images, across all apps, at the operating system level. Or face legislation, fines, and, as a last resort, criminal liability for tech executives.2

Not one of Apple’s WWDC announcements addresses that specific demand.

Google, which had no equivalent developer conference to stand behind today, made no announcements at all.

That gap, between what Apple chose to announce and what the government had to demand from both companies, is what I want to talk about.

What Apple Did Announce and Why It Matters

The WWDC child safety package is not a press release dressed up as progress. Ask to Browse is a meaningful addition. Parents I speak to regularly tell me their children find ways around website restrictions because the friction is too low. Requiring a child to actively request permission before visiting a new site creates a moment of pause that most current parental controls do not.

The expanded Communication Safety feature, which already blurs nudity before a child sends or receives it in Apple’s Messages app, is now extending to graphic violence as well and is a real improvement. Screen Time, getting age-based recommendations from child development experts, rather than leaving parents to guess at appropriate limits, is the kind of practical tool that actually gets used because it removes the paralysis of not knowing where to start.

So, Apple moved on child safety today, credit where it is due.

What it did not do was answer the government’s specific demand, which is not a technicality.

The Gap: Why Google Has No Cover

Apple’s Communication Safety system, the nudity detection that blurs images, works within Apple’s own Messages app. It uses on-device machine learning. The image is processed on the phone and never reaches Apple’s servers. The privacy architecture is sound.

But it does not cover third-party apps. A child on an iPhone who attempts to send a nude image via Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Instagram bypasses it entirely. Snapchat alone accounted for 43% of the crimes where UK police recorded the platform in child sexual abuse image cases in the most recent reporting year.3 That’s not a minor gap, that’s where the majority of the harm is happening.

Google has equivalent on-device image classification tools built into Android and its SafeSearch infrastructure. The same gap exists there. Android phones running third-party messaging apps carry no operating system-level protection either. Today, unlike Apple, Google had no WWDC to point to, no package of new features to show the world and it made no announcements. The government’s ultimatum landed on both companies. Only one of them was standing behind something today.

What Starmer is pushing for is detection built into the operating system itself, so that Snapchat and WhatsApp cannot bypass it by default. The government’s position is that the technology already exists, that both Apple and Google have the capability, and that the only question is whether they choose to use it. Today’s WWDC package suggests Apple is willing to move when it wants to. The question the ultimatum poses is whether Apple and Google will move on this specific thing, across all apps, within three months, without being legislated into it.

What Investigators Actually See When This Content Circulates

I spent eight years as a Digital Forensics and Incident Response specialist in the Royal Air Force Police. During that time, I analysed in excess of a million images. Approximately a quarter of those were criminal across all levels of grading scales.

There was no counselling in place. No structured support. I eventually left the RAF with a diagnosis of Complex PTSD, medically discharged in 2019.

I am not sharing that to make this about me, but because when people cover today’s announcements as a product story, as a race between Apple’s WWDC and the government’s ultimatum, they sometimes lose sight of what sits beneath both. What is inside those images. What investigators carry home. What children and families go through when this content is created and circulated. This is not a feature comparison. It is a harm story.

This harm is not hypothetical. Between April 2024 and March 2025, UK police recorded 36,829 offences involving indecent images of children. A nine per cent rise on the year before. Both Apple and Google have known about these numbers. Both have had the tools to reduce the harm at the device level. Today, one of them took a bow at a developer conference. The other said nothing. More importantly, though, neither of them has yet done the specific thing the government is asking for.

The Sextortion Pipeline

I want to be precise about why device-level blocking matters beyond what Apple announced today.

Sextortion, the practice of coercing children into producing sexual imagery and then demanding money or more images under threat of exposure, has industrialised. Criminal networks, many based in West Africa and Southeast Asia, target children at scale. Predominantly, teenage boys, though girls are not immune, use gaming platforms, Instagram, Snapchat, and direct messaging. They build trust using fake profiles, request an image, and then the demands begin.

In multiple UK cases, this has ended in suicide. Children as young as 11 have been targeted. The entire pipeline runs through the messaging apps on the device in your child’s hand.4

Ask to Browse does not stop this. Communication Safety in Apple Messages does not stop this. What stops it is the image never being created or sent in the first place, at the device level, across all apps, regardless of which platform the predator is using.

That is the specific thing Starmer asked Apple and Google to do today. Neither company has done it yet. One of them at least moved on other things. The other did nothing.

We Have Already Seen Proof This Can Be Done

I wrote about this in March and it is directly relevant to today’s news.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, runs a completely separate version of the app inside China called Douyin. Chinese children under 14 are automatically placed into a restricted mode with hard time limits, educational content only, overnight lockouts, and scroll-interruption prompts. It is a different product, built because the Chinese government demanded it. Not because ByteDance decided to prioritise child wellbeing voluntarily.

The argument I made then holds today, companies build child-protective features when governments compel them to. Apple’s WWDC announcements are voluntary, and they are welcome. The specific device-level blocking the government is now demanding is not yet voluntary.

Apple’s WWDC package shows the company can move when it chooses to. Google’s silence today shows what happens when there is no conference, no audience and no spotlight. The ultimatum is the spotlight. Watch what both companies do next.

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The Age Verification Problem

The government has specified that adults will retain the ability to take and share nude images through an age verification process. Implementing that at the device level is not a solved problem.

Age verification currently ranges from credit card checks, which exclude adults without one and do nothing against a teenager using a parent’s card, to facial estimation technology, which has documented accuracy problems across diverse ages and skin tones. Three months will not produce a perfect system. It may produce meaningful friction, and in child protection, friction matters. Most harm is not caused by determined workarounds. It is caused by moments of poor judgment, grooming that exploits trust, and sextortion that moves fast. Every barrier that slows those pathways down has value.

I raise this not to undermine the push but because parents and safeguarding professionals deserve an honest account of what a deadline produces, and what it does not.

What This Means for Parents and Safeguarding Professionals Right Now

Two things are true at the same time today. Apple announced useful features worth setting up. Device-level nude image blocking, across all apps, on both Apple and Google devices, does not yet exist. Here is what to do while we wait.

For parents:

• When iOS 27 arrives, set up Ask to Browse. It is not a complete filter but it creates a pause before children visit unknown sites, and pauses matter.

• Right now: Settings > Screen Time > Communication Limits. Check that Communication Safety is active on your child’s iPhone. It covers Apple Messages. It does not cover Snapchat or Instagram. Know the difference.

• If your child has an Android phone, go into Digital Wellbeing and review what parental controls are active. Google’s tools exist but are not enabled by default and do not cover third-party messaging apps at the OS level.

• Have the conversation about nude images before the technology catches up. Ask your child, if that image ended up somewhere you did not intend, what would happen? That conversation is more protective than any app that currently exists.

For teachers and DSLs:

• Update your staff briefing on sextortion now. The industrialised version of this crime targets boys predominantly, and boys are far less likely to disclose. Your male students are at higher risk than most colleagues realise.

• Today’s dual announcement is a teaching moment for older students. The gap between what Apple voluntarily announced and what the government had to demand from both Apple and Google is itself a lesson in platform accountability that teenagers can engage with critically.

• Ensure your safeguarding team is aware of the three-month timeline. When device-level changes arrive, schools will need to communicate them clearly to parents.

The Bottom Line

Apple had a good day at WWDC 2026. The features announced are real improvements and parents should use them.

On the same day, Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google a legal ultimatum for the one specific protection neither company has built voluntarily. Google did not announce a single thing in response. Apple’s WWDC, welcome as it is, did not touch it.

Those two facts sitting side by side tell you everything you need to know about how this space moves without regulatory pressure. It moves on what is convenient, what is profitable, and what looks good at a developer conference. The thing that protects children from sextortion pipelines does not check any of those boxes without someone making it mandatory.

Three months, both companies, device-level nude image blocking across all apps.

Watch what they do next.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

There is a toy in many UK children’s bedrooms right now. It is colourful, squishy, and completely harmless when used as intended. It is called a NeeDoh, and children love it, some of you will already have one in the house.

What is not harmless is what children have been watching online. A trend circulating on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube tells them that putting the toy in a microwave makes it softer and more elastic. The videos make it look fun, they make it look easy, but they do not show what happens next!

What happens next is that the silicone outer shell acts as an insulator. The outside feels cool to the touch, but inside, the gel reaches boiling point. When a child squeezes it, the toy bursts and scalding gel coats their hands and face in seconds.

In Bristol, a 10-year-old girl called Bella is now at risk of permanent facial scarring.1 In Illinois, a nine-year-old boy called Caleb had his eye swell shut and was transferred to a specialist burns unit. In Missouri, a seven-year-old girl was placed in a medically induced coma for three days. Hospitals across the US treated multiple cases in a single week in February 2026.2

This is not a fringe trend, it is active and it is reaching children worldwide right now.

How the Algorithm Serves This to Your Child

I want you to understand how this gets in front of children, because it explains why simply taking the toy away is not enough on its own.

NeeDoh went viral in late 2025 and early 2026, partly through ASMR-style squeeze videos and ‘NeeDoh hunting’ content, where creators film themselves searching shops for new varieties.3 By early 2026, Google searches for ‘NeeDoh’ were outpacing searches for ‘stress ball’ by more than tenfold.

Within that enormous wave of content, videos showing the microwave ‘hack’ began appearing. They are framed as life tips and they look like every other squishy toy video. A child watching NeeDoh content sees them because the platforms surface them. The child is not looking for danger, but the danger finds the child.

As of early May 2026, Safer Schools confirmed that TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube were still surfacing this content when users searched for ‘needoh microwave.’ Videos with safety warnings have increased, but the original how-to content has not been fully removed.

TikTok told the BBC that content promoting dangerous behaviour is removed when found.4 The manufacturer, Schylling, says it has partnered with social media companies to remove misuse content. The gap between those statements and what is actually on the platforms has already injured children.

Please do not search for this trend directly on the platforms. Every search signals to the algorithm that this content has demand. It pushes the videos to more users, if you want to check whether your child has seen it, talk to them instead.

The Toy Is Not the Problem

The NeeDoh is not dangerous when used normally. It is a sensory toy and the packaging carries a warning not to heat, freeze, or microwave it.

The problem is that children are consuming content that directly contradicts those safety instructions, at scale, before most parents even know the trend exists.

That is the pattern we see again and again with harmful viral content. The danger is not obvious. It is disguised as something harmless, something fun, something everyone else is doing and by the time a parent finds out, a child has already tried it.

In most reported cases, the child was unsupervised. There was no adult present to intervene. That is not a failure of parenting, it is a design intent. These platforms are engineered to keep children watching, alone, for as long as possible.

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What You Can Do Right Now

You don’t need to cause alarm, no need for a formal sit-down conversation. This is a practical, calm five-minute chat.

If your child has a NeeDoh or similar squishy toy:

• Tell them the toy should never go in the microwave, freezer, or oven. Matter-of-fact, not alarming.

• Ask whether they have seen anyone do this online, that question opens the door if needed.

• If they have seen it, ask what they thought about it. You are not interrogating them, you are listening.

The conversation that protects children most is not the lecture, it is the habit of talking. When children know they can come to you with things they have seen online, without fear of losing their phone or being told off, they are far more likely to come to you before they try something.

Brand Names to Look Out For

The toys are sold under several names, including NeeDoh, Squishies, Nice Cubes, and Jelly Cubes. They are available in UK shops, on Amazon and the TikTok Shop. This is not a product recall because the toys are safe when used as intended.

For Teachers and DSLs

Safer Schools issued a formal safeguarding alert on 7 May 2026.5 Key points for any parent communication:

• Brand names most commonly involved: NeeDoh, Squishies, Nice Cubes, Jelly Cubes.

• The packaging warning against heating is often missing once a child has the toy.

• Children who do not have the toy themselves may still encounter the trend through friends.

• Do not direct parents or staff to search for the trend on platforms directly.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Something I have said many times before whilst doing this work.

No one person can do this alone.

I’ve said it to parents and teachers. I’ve said it in presentations, in conversations and in the quiet moments after someone’s told me something that’s broken their heart a little.

So when I started talking properly with Chad and Kae, the people behind Cybersecurity Parents, it felt less like a collaboration and more like a recognition of that fact. Two teams, different sides of the Atlantic, fighting the same battle. The threats we encounter don’t have a postcode. They don’t care whether your child is in Leeds or Los Angeles. The dark corners of the internet look the same from both directions.

Who Are Chad and Kae?

Chad Rychlewski and Kae David are the founders of Cybersecurity Parents LLC, a mission-driven organisation built around one simple idea, that families deserve the knowledge and tools to navigate the digital world safely.

What I like about them, straight away, is that they are practitioners. Not academics, not commentators. But people with 30 years of combined experience in cybersecurity between them, who decided that the knowledge they had was too important to stay inside corporate boardrooms. That might sound familiar to people who have followed me for a while.

They’ve gon a step further than me and channelled all of that into a book. Cyber-Smart Parenting: Protecting Your Child in the Digital Age. Before I say anything else about it, I want to be clear, I bought this book, nobody sent me a copy and nobody asked me to review it. I read it because I wanted to, and now I’m recommending it to you because it’s good.

What Makes the Book Worth Your Time

The thing I always look for in any child safety resource is whether it speaks to parents and not at them. Whether it treats the person reading as an adult who is already doing their best and just needs some practical help, not a lecture.

Cyber-Smart Parenting does that. The tone is direct and warm at the same time, which is genuinely difficult to pull off, I should know, as I spend a lot of time trying to. The advice is age-specific, which matters a great deal because the risks facing a nine-year-old are completely different from those facing a fifteen-year-old. Also, because Chad and Kae come from a technical background, the explanations are accurate, not dumbed down or dramatised.

If you’ve ever tried to explain to a parent why their child’s privacy settings matter, you’ll know how hard it is to be both precise and accessible. This book actually manages it.1

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Why Collaboration Matters in This Space

I spent years inside the evidence of what happens when children are failed online. That experience has shaped everything I do now, it also taught me something important, the problem is too big for any single person, any single organisation, or any single country to solve.

We all bring something different to the party. Chad and Kae bring deep technical expertise and a book that gives parents a tangible starting point. I bring the investigative background, the guides, the school’s resources and the UK context. Together, we cover more ground and that’s the point.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll see some of that collaboration come to life, including some reels their team are producing to highlight the CSG guides. It’s practical, it’s purposeful, and honestly, it’s the kind of thing that makes this work continue to feel worthwhile.

What I’m Asking You to Do

Three things.

First, grab a copy of the book. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or someone working in safeguarding, it belongs on your shelf and you can find it here in the UK, or here if you are in the US.

Second, follow Cybersecurity Parents. They’re on Instagram and LinkedIn. Good people doing great work, they deserve your attention.

Third, keep the conversations going at home, with your children, without judgement. That is always, always the most important thing!

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

1

Cyber-Smart Parenting: Protecting Your Child in the Digital Age, Chad Rychlewski and Kae David, Cybersecurity Parents LLC. Available at https://amzn.eu/d/0cVmM0wk (accessed May 2026). Personal purchase and recommendation. No payment or incentive received. Or via the following QR code via their website.

If you have a child who plays Roblox, you probably think of it as a safe, colourful game about building things and exploring virtual worlds. That is the version most parents see, it is also the version most children want you to see.

This week, Sky News published a follow-up investigation confirming that illegal gambling casinos are operating inside Roblox’s ecosystem. Children are using them openly. One user typed “yea im 13” in a casino chatroom in January this year, nobody stopped them.1

This is not a new problem. It is a problem that was exposed, supposedly fixed, and came straight back. Here is what you need to know.

What are these sites and how do they work?

If your child plays Roblox, they know what Robux are. It is Roblox’s in-game currency, bought with real money, around £8.99 for 800 Robux, used to buy outfits, accessories, and upgrades inside the game.

What most parents do not know is that Robux can be used to gamble.

A network of third-party websites, operating entirely outside of Roblox, allows children to log in using their existing Roblox account details, the same username and password they use to play the game, then use their Robux to place bets. The games on offer include “Crash” (a multiplier bet where you cash out before a graph crashes), roulette, slots, and head-to-head games. Winnings come back as Robux or directly as cryptocurrency.

These sites are not part of Roblox. Roblox does not run them and says it prohibits them. But they use Roblox’s own currency and your child’s own login. To a child, it looks like part of the Roblox world.

Four things parents need to understand right now

1. There are no age checks

None of these sites verifies age. A child logs in with their Roblox account and they are in. Sky News screenshot a chatroom message from a 13-year-old, dated January 2025. Nobody removed them, nobody asked a question. That is the full extent of the age protection on these platforms.

2. The UK geoblock is not a protection

Some sites geoblock UK users because they are not licensed to operate here. It sounds reassuring. One of the casinos in the investigation, Rollbet, was found to have staff actively telling users to use a VPN to bypass the block. A VPN is a free app that masks your location online. Any teenager with a smartphone can install one in two minutes. The block is effectively a door with the key left in it.

3. Real money moves through this

Robux is not Monopoly money. It is purchased with real currency, a child who has received Robux as a birthday gift, earned it through the game, or had a parent top up their account, is gambling with real cash. Winnings can be converted back into cash or cryptocurrency. Rollbet, one of the named sites, had over 35,500 members on its Discord server before it announced it was shutting down.

4. The casinos that get shut down come back

One site, BloxFlip, announced it was “permanently shutting down” within 36 hours of being named in the original Sky News investigation in December 2024. Then it emailed the journalist who exposed it to announce its return “under new ownership.” These operators have learned that the consequences of exposure are temporary. That tells you everything about whether they fear the current regulatory body.

What the Gambling Commission already knows

This is not new information for the regulator.

The Gambling Commission’s 2025 Young People and Gambling official statistics, published last November, specifically named Roblox as one of the platforms where awareness of gambling-like features is highest among young people.2 Their qualitative research found that loot boxes and skin gambling in games, including Roblox, can serve as early pathways into problem gambling. Half of all young people surveyed already knew you could bet with in-game items on outside websites.

Back in December 2025, I wrote about a podcast interview in which Roblox’s CEO called the idea of putting prediction markets inside Roblox a “brilliant idea.” The fuller picture of the company’s approach to these risks is there if you want it.

Will Prochaska, director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads, told Sky News he found it “surprising” and “saddening” that the commission had not “done more to stop” the Roblox casinos, and that a “systemic” approach could have addressed the problem.3 The commission’s response pointed to ongoing work across regulators and enforcement bodies, and added that they “would also like parents and carers to be vigilant to sites used by children.”4

I understand what regulators are up against. But asking parents to be vigilant about sites they do not know exist, using currency from a game they thought was safe, is not a safeguarding strategy. The commission’s own data tells us how widespread this already is among children. The response needs to match that reality.

Roblox told Sky News they “firmly prohibit all simulated and actual gambling activities” on the platform, and that players are “prohibited from engaging in off-platform secondary-market transactions for Roblox items or Robux.”

Those are the right words. I have watched organisations recite the correct policy language while harm was still occurring. The policy existing and the policy working are two entirely different things.

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How to protect children from illegal Roblox gambling sites

For parents

Talk to your child about Roblox. Not as a lecture, as a conversation. Ask which games they play, have they ever seen anything about winning Robux or a Roblox casino? Curiosity is far less threatening than an interrogation, children are far more likely to open up when they feel safe to do so.

Explain what Robux is and how it works. Many children and parents do not realise Robux has real cash value. It can be purchased with real money and used in ways that look and feel like gambling. Understanding that helps a child recognise when something is not right.

Check your child’s Roblox account settings. Make sure the account age is set correctly, parental controls are enabled, and chat settings are appropriate. Roblox does have parental controls. They work better when you know they are there.

Know the names. BloxFlip and Rollbet are two that have been publicly named. If your child mentions a Roblox casino or anywhere you can win Robux, take it seriously.

Be their safe space. If your child has already visited one of these sites, has gambled, or has seen something that worried them, the worst outcome is that they feel they cannot tell you. Make it clear, and keep making it clear, that they can come to you with anything they have seen or done online, without anger or punishment.

Guides and resources for parents are available at guides.cybersafetyguy.com.

For teachers and DSLs

This is worth raising in PSHE and in safeguarding briefings, particularly for KS3 and KS4 where Roblox use remains high.

If a child discloses that they have been gambling online, treat it with the same seriousness as any online risk disclosure. A conversation with parents or carers is warranted, and depending on the extent of the harm, a referral may be appropriate.

The VPN angle is worth addressing in digital literacy sessions. A child who knows how to bypass a geoblock to access a gambling site may be using the same method to access other restricted content. Understanding that children are actively working around these restrictions changes what “online safety” software actually protects against.

Peer influence is a significant driver here. These sites are found through friends, Discord, and social media influencers. The entry point is social, not solitary, which means school-based conversations about gambling risk are more relevant than they might appear.

If your school uses Roblox as part of a creative or digital curriculum, it is worth reviewing whether existing digital safety guidance covers third-party sites that use Roblox credentials.

Guides and resources for schools, including PSHE materials and DSL briefing cards, are available at schools.cybersafetyguy.com.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Fewer than one in five children who experience online harm tell a trusted adult about it.1 This is not primarily a child online safety awareness problem, as most parents already know online safety risks exist. The problem is a conversation problem, which has a practical solution.

Today, a free tool called the Conversation Guide Generator is live on the CSG Resource Hub. It is built for parents, teachers and DSLs who know something needs to be said, but are not sure how to say it.

Why Most Parents and Teachers Don’t Know What to Say About Online Safety

I have presented on the topic of child online safety. The question I get asked most often is not “what are the risks?” Parents know the risks, they have seen the headlines and they worry.

The question I get asked most is: “What do I actually say?”

What do you say to an eight-year-old about grooming that informs without terrifying? How do you ask a fourteen-year-old about sextortion without making them feel interrogated or embarrassed? What is the opening line for a Year 9 teacher who suspects something is wrong? What does a DSL say in the first sixty seconds after a child online safety disclosure?

That gap, between knowing something is wrong and knowing what to say about it, is where children fall through. The research on why fewer than one in five tell a trusted adult is consistent, children have learned, from watching how adults react, that telling someone might make everything worse. Their device gets taken away, the conversation turns into a lecture or the adult panics. The child learns, next time, stay quiet.

That is not a parenting failure, it is a communication failure. Luckily, communication failures are fixable.

Free Online Safety Conversation Guide for Parents, Teachers and DSLs

The Conversation Guide Generator is free to use on the CSG Resource Hub. You pick five things: your role (parent, teacher, or DSL), the child’s age, the platform or app, the concern, and whether a disclosure has already happened. The tool builds a plain-English online safety conversation guide with six sections:

• How to open the conversation

• Age-appropriate language guidance

• What not to say, and why

• Questions to ask

• What to do after

• How to follow up if they shut down

Nine online safety concerns are covered: grooming, sextortion and image-based abuse, cyberbullying, screen time and device overuse, radicalisation, self-harm online, AI risks (deepfakes, companions and chatbots), stranger contact, and explicit content exposure.

Five age groups: under 8, 8 to 10, 11 to 13, 14 to 16, and 17 to 18. Every output adapts to role, age, platform, and whether the conversation is preventative or post-disclosure. It also prints cleanly for parent evenings, safeguarding folders, or keeping on your desk.

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How to Talk to a Child About Online Safety: Why the Conversation Is the Protection

The single most protective factor in child online safety is not parental controls or platform regulation, though both matter. It is whether a child believes an adult will respond well if they say something.

That belief is created or destroyed one conversation at a time.

I have seen what happens when children do not tell anyone and would rather keep it a secret. I built this tool because I know the gap is real and I know it is closeable. You do not need to be an online safety expert. You need the right words at the right moment.

Free. No sign-up required, but subscribe to stay up to date.

Have the Conversation

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

There are two versions of TikTok.

The one your child uses, then the one ByteDance built for children in China, with daily time limits, overnight lockouts, and an algorithm designed to make their lives richer rather than shorter.

They built the safe version because Chinese law required it. They chose not to build it for yours.

That’s where Bora Seker and I started last week on the Dumb Ways To Get Hacked podcast. It was my first time as a guest rather than a host and for nearly two hours, we went into territory I rarely cover in one sitting.

ByteDance and the two-TikTok problem

ByteDance has the technology to protect your child. They built it. It exists, and it works, because Chinese children are using it right now. They chose not to apply it to the international version of TikTok because child safety doesn’t generate profit, but engagement does.

Until regulators make it more expensive to harm children than to protect them, they will keep making business decisions over safety decisions.

They’re feeding salad to Chinese children and opium to everyone else’s.

AI grooming and what eight minutes actually means

A previous guest of Bora’s shared a stat that grooming can now take as little as eight minutes1. When I was working in Digital Forensics and Incident Response within the RAF, building a false identity took weeks of patient work. Now, a convincing profile, a cloned voice, a deepfake video call, all of it can be assembled in minutes with tools anyone can find with a quick search.

We talked about what that means for parents who think they’d spot a fake. The honest answer is that it’s much harder than most people assume, even for experts.

What the algorithm does before a predator says hello

Before any predator makes contact, the algorithm has often already done the groundwork. It finds children questioning their worth and serves them content that makes it worse. By the time someone online says I understand you, you’re perfect, the child has been made ready to hear it.

The doomscroll isn’t just a mental health problem. It generates the conditions predators need, built quietly by platforms that profit from it.

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What this work actually costs

Bora asked me directly, and I was, as always, honest. The version of me that started that DFIR role didn’t survive it. What I wear now is a mask. Most people get the version of me who has it together. The only person who sees behind it is Colleen.

I talked about the C-PTSD diagnosis in 2018, the medication I’ll probably be on for the rest of my life, and the somniphobia that means I write on this platform at 3 am rather than sleep, because I still go to bed to try and make life as normal as possible for Colleen.

I also talked about Leffe, my French Bulldog, who was with me for most of that journey and passed away in December. He was my pebble. It’s quieter and lonelier without him.

I don’t often go that deep in one conversation. Worth watching if you want to know more about those parts of me and my story.

What parents can actually do

We came back to this at the end, because I always do. Technical controls matter, of course, they do, so set them up. But they can and will fail. What protects a child when they do is a trusted adult they know will help them, not punish them.

That relationship starts long before anything goes wrong, with small, ongoing, non-judgmental conversations about what their online life actually looks like. Not a formal talk, just an open door that they know they can go through anytime, 24/7.

The full episode is 45 minutes. Bora is a sharp interviewer and I think there’s something in this conversation worth your time, whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or you work in safeguarding.

👉 Watch here:

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Six months ago, I sat down and wrote an update very much like this one. Back then, I had a single paid subscriber keeping the faith (Cheers, Jules!). One person. And if you have ever been in a position where one person believing in you is the difference between carrying on or calling it a day, you will know what that felt like.

Today, I have six!

Six months. Six paid subscribers. An awful lot to be grateful for.

Let me give you the numbers first, because transparency is the whole point here for me. Paid subscriptions since November have generated £287.84 in gross income. Stripe, who process the payments, take their fees, which came to £37.23. That would have left £250.61 going to Childline.

I am covering those fees myself.

The full net amount goes to the charity, and I am topping it up to make it a round three hundred pounds.

£300 is being donated to Childline today.

That is not a small number when it comes from a blog that is, by design, not trying to make anyone rich. This is not a business, it is a mission. The money is going to a charity that answers the phone when a child has nobody else to call.1

The growth matters too

When I wrote the November update, this blog had 288 subscribers. Today, it has 493.

I know some people would look at 493 and think, that’s a small number. In the world of social media metrics, maybe it is. But I think about it differently. That is 493 people who looked at the subject of children’s online safety and decided it was worth their time. That is 493 people who might have a different conversation with their child, their student, their colleague, because of something they read here, which is what keeps me going. If one child is diverted away from harm, then it was all worth it to me.

The ripple effect of that cannot and should not be measured in a Stripe dashboard.

From one paid subscriber to six. From 288 to 493. The oak is growing.

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A note on why I do this

I spent the last eight years of my RAF Police career working in digital forensics and incident response. I analysed over a million images, at least a quarter of which were criminal, with no counselling and no support. I was medically discharged with C-PTSD in 2019.

I am not writing that to generate sympathy. I am writing it because it is the answer to the question I get asked most, “Why do you keep doing this when the subject is so heavy?”

Because I have seen what happens when nobody is watching. Because I have sat with the evidence of what adults do to children when they think the internet gives them cover. Also, because I would rather spend my energy getting that information to parents and teachers than sitting with it alone.

Every paid subscription is a vote of confidence in that reason. Every pound you send goes to Childline, not to me.

Thank you

To my six paid subscribers: I see you, and it means the world to me.

To my 493 readers: you are the reason I keep writing when my head is telling me to walk away.

If you have been thinking about upgrading to a paid subscription, you now know exactly where it goes. It does not sit in my pocket. It goes to help a child who picks up the phone in the middle of the night, when they have nowhere else to turn.

That feels like a reason worth enabling.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

There are 7 days left.

That is how long you have to tell the UK government what you think about children’s online safety. Not as a comment on a post, not as a reply to a thread, but as a formal consultation response, on record, that feeds directly into future legislation.

The consultation, titled “Growing up in the online world,” was published by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on 2 March 2026. It closes at 11:59 pm on 26 May 2026.1 [5]

Most parents and teachers I have spoken to have no idea it exists. That is not a surprise. Government consultations, just like my content on child safety, are not exactly known for going viral. This one matters more than most and this is why.

We Already Know What’s Possible

Before I get into what the consultation actually covers, I want to come back to something I wrote about in March, because it is the most important piece of context for everything that follows.2

ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, also operates a completely separate version of the same app inside China, called Douyin. And what children in China get on Douyin is radically different from what your child gets on TikTok.

In China, any child under 14 who opens Douyin is automatically placed into Youth Mode. No opt-in required, no settings menu to navigate, it switches on by default. That means a 40-minute daily time limit, an overnight lockout between 10 pm and 6 am and an algorithm that serves science experiments, museum exhibits, and educational material instead of entertainment-led content. There are even deliberate five-second pauses between videos, with prompts that say things like “put down the phone” and “go to bed.”

In the UK? None of that. Your child gets the same algorithm as an adult. TikTok introduced a 60-minute daily limit for under-18s in 2023, but teenagers aged 13 to 18 can override that limit themselves without any parental involvement.3 Research has shown that newly registered teen accounts can be served self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of signing up.4

The same company. The same underlying technology. Two completely different products.

“ByteDance makes a ‘spinach version’ of the app for Chinese children and ships the ‘opium version’ to the rest of the world.” - Tristan Harris, Centre for Humane Technology 5

Why? Not because building the protected version here is technically impossible. They have already built it, so the technology exists. What has not existed, until now, is a government that has formally asked whether we should require platforms to use it here.

That is exactly what this consultation is.

What the Consultation Actually Covers

This is not a vague well-being exercise. The government is consulting on specific, concrete measures.

• A minimum age for children to access social media, and what that age should be.

• Restrictions on addictive design features that encourage excessive use, including infinite scrolling and autoplay.

• Whether the digital age of consent should be raised.

• How age-verification and age-assurance technologies can be used to enforce these changes effectively.

• Whether the existing guidance on mobile phones in schools should be made statutory.

• Better support for parents and carers, including clearer guidance and simpler, standardised parental control tools.

These are not small questions. The answers will shape what online platforms are legally required to do, and what Ofcom has the power to enforce.

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Three Surveys. One Deadline.

There are three separate surveys available:

• A full consultation, open to anyone, including civil society organisations, industry, and members of the public.

• A survey specifically for parents and carers of young people aged 21 and under.

• A survey for children and young people aged 10 to 21.

That last one is very important. Children’s voices are not often formally invited into policy processes at this level. If you have a young person aged between 10 and 21 in your life, please share this with them.

Why Your Voice Matters

Government consultations receive responses from the platforms and from industry representatives. Those voices will be heard, the question is whether they are the only voices heard.

Every parent who takes 15 minutes to respond, every teacher, every DSL, every safeguarding professional and every person who has seen first-hand what happens when platforms are not held to account. Those responses matter, they are on record and they will inform what becomes law.

From my own experience, analysing evidence of what happens to children when online spaces are not safe, I can tell you that the distance between policy and lived reality is often enormous. The people who close that gap are the ones who show up when asked.

You are being asked. Please show up!

How to Respond

Go to www.gov.uk and search for “Growing up in the online world consultation.”

The three surveys are accessible from there. I have completed the full consultation and it takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes. The parents and carers survey is shorter, you do not need to answer every question and you do not need specialist knowledge to participate.

The consultation closes at 11:59 pm on 26 May 2026.

Please do not leave it until the last day, also, please do not assume that someone else will do it.

What I Want to See Come Out of This

In my view, the most important outcome of this consultation is not just age verification, as important as that is. Age verification is step one; what matters is what happens after the check.

Knowing that a user is 12 years old and then continuing to serve them the same algorithm as a 35-year-old is not child safety, It is merely compliance theatre.

ByteDance has already proven that the technology exists to do better. They built a protected version of TikTok that changes the entire product experience for children, because the Chinese government demanded it. They can build the same here. They choose not to because nobody has legally required it.

This consultation is the beginning of changing that.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Editor’s note, added [15 May 2026]:

Since publishing this piece, I was contacted by Sarah Smith, author of the Project Intercept impact report and lead on the project itself. She raised an important and fair correction about how I framed the 1% click-through rate, and she is right.

I described it as a design problem. That was too narrow.

Project Intercept’s warning messages serve two functions: they deter, and they signpost. I only measured the second one. The deterrence function is harder to quantify, but the data exists. An evaluation of Project Intercept’s chatbot intervention on Pornhub UK found that 82% of users desisted from searching after receiving a single warning message. That is not a footnote. That is the primary mechanism doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Not everyone who stops searching needs to click through for help. Some people need the behavioural nudge, and that is enough. Click-through matters for those who are ready to seek support, but it is the wrong headline measure for the project as a whole.

I have updated the relevant section below to reflect this. The correction is mine. The work Sarah and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation are doing remains, as I said, genuinely remarkable.

I want to start this one with something I don’t experience often enough.

I want to start with hope.

That doesn’t come easily in this work. After eight years investigating digital crimes involving children, years that cost me more than I knew at the time, I’ve got a fairly low threshold for optimism when it comes to what’s happening online. But every now and then, something happens that makes me think, right, this is proof that the fight is working.

This is one of those things.

But I’m also not going to let anyone off the hook, because buried inside the hopeful headline is a number that demands a conversation.

What Actually Happened

In the past two years, more than 70 million warning messages were sent to people who were searching online for illegal images of children.1

Seventy million. Let that number breathe for a second.

These warnings are part of something called Project Intercept, run by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK charity that has been doing critical child protection work for decades. The way it works is straightforward in principle, and genuinely impressive in practice. When someone uses search terms online that suggest they’re looking for illegal content involving children, or clicks on a link previously flagged as containing such material, they receive a message, not a block, not an arrest. A message that says what they’re doing is illegal, explains the harm, and offers them a route towards help.

The tech partnership behind this includes Meta, TikTok, Google, and platforms spanning gaming, streaming, dating and AI. Twenty-two different warning messages, reaching users in 131 countries. At its peak, more than 95,000 alerts were triggered every single day.2

That is an extraordinary thing, I want you to know it exists.

The AI Factor

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to parents, teachers, and anyone who’ll sit still long enough, about what AI has done and continues to do to the threat landscape for children.

Not because I want to scare people. Because understanding what we’re dealing with is the only way to fight it properly.

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation’s chief executive said it best: “The need has never been more urgent, particularly as new AI technologies accelerate the spread of online child sexual abuse.”

I’ve been saying a version of this since I started blogging. The technology that used to make the creation of illegal imagery difficult, requiring real-world access to victims, has been fundamentally disrupted. AI has lowered the barrier so dramatically that the scale of what’s being produced and circulated is growing in ways that are genuinely hard to track, let alone address.

And here’s what I find both infuriating and galvanising in equal measure.

The same AI capabilities being used to create and spread harm are also being deployed to stop it. Project Intercept is living proof of that. Intelligent systems, running quietly in the background on the platforms your children use every day, identifying the patterns, catching the searches, stepping in before harm can progress.

This is what prevention at scale looks like. And I want more of it.

The Number I Got Wrong

I want to be straight with you, because I always try to be, that means owning something.

When I published this piece, I framed the 1% click-through rate as a problem, possibly even a design failure. Sarah Smith, the author of the Project Intercept impact report and lead on the project itself, reached out to correct me. She was right to do it.

Here is what I missed.

Project Intercept’s warning messages do two things: they deter, and they signpost. I only measured the second one.

The deterrence function is the primary mechanism. When someone receives a warning message, the majority stop searching. Full stop. A chatbot evaluation on Pornhub UK found that 82% of users desisted after a single warning message.

That is not a footnote to the story. That is the story.

Not everyone who stops needs to click through to access support. Some people need the behavioural nudge, and nothing else. The click-through rate only captures the people who are both concerned about their own thoughts or behaviour and ready to seek help in that moment. That will always be a small proportion, and it is supposed to be.

Professor Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics noted that the click-through figure seems low given the scale of the warnings sent.3 That observation has merit in isolation, but Sarah’s point is the important one: measuring success only by click-through is to miss the bigger picture. The invisible deterrence effect is still working. It is just harder to count.

So to be clear: 700,000 people being directed towards support is real and meaningful. And 70 million warnings disrupting behaviour in the moment, with the majority of people desisting on contact, is the intervention doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I was too quick to call that insufficient. The correction is mine.

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What This Means for Our Children

Here is what I want you to actually take from this, beyond the statistics.

This story is proof that technology can be deployed proactively, before harm happens, rather than just reactively after the damage is done. We spend a lot of time, rightly, holding platforms accountable when they fail. Project Intercept is what it looks like when they commit.

There is a version of the internet where the architecture itself pushes back. Where a journey towards harm is intercepted before it reaches a child. We are not there yet. But we are moving in the right direction.

It also confirms something I’ve believed since this blog began, the people who pose a risk to children online are not a fringe problem happening in places the rest of you will never see. They are on the same platforms your children use. They are triggering 95,000 warnings a day. That number is uncomfortable, and it is meant to be.

A Word on Accountability

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation has called on more tech companies to join and scale what works. I’m adding my voice to that.

Google, Meta, TikTok: you’re on the right side of this particular line. The partnership with Project Intercept represents a genuine commitment, and the results, imperfect as they are, represent real harm reduction.

But 1% is not a finish line. The click-through rate tells you the messaging isn’t reaching the people who most need to change their behaviour. The infrastructure exists. The intervention points exist. The follow-through needs work, and you have the capability to improve it.

Every platform not on that partnership list, under the Online Safety Act, you have obligations. Ofcom has powers it has not yet fully exercised. The question is whether it does.3

What You Can Do Right Now

I’m not going to pretend this is light reading. It isn’t. I know that.

But I want to leave you with something concrete.

1. Keep the conversation going at home. A child who feels they can talk to a trusted adult about anything they’ve seen or been asked online is safer. It sounds simple. It is, in my view, the single most protective thing you can do. Not monitoring software. Not content filters. Open, honest, non-judgmental conversation.

2. Know the resources exist. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation’s Stop It Now service (stopitnow.org.uk) is for anyone concerned about their own thoughts or behaviour, or about someone else’s. It is confidential. It exists because early intervention works.

3. Report what concerns you. If something on a platform worries you, report it through the platform’s own tools. If the response is inadequate, escalate to Ofcom. These systems only work when people use them.

4. Talk to your children about AI. Not to frighten them. To arm them. People online are not always who they claim to be, and AI has made that harder to spot than ever. That conversation needs to be happening now, if it isn’t already.

If any child is worried about something they’ve seen or been asked online, they don’t need to face it alone.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

A few years ago, Omegle was the name every parent needed to know. A random video chat site where you could be paired with a complete stranger, and where children and predators ended up in the same digital room with terrifying regularity. It was eventually shut down in November 2023, after significant legal pressure and years of documented harm to minors.

This week, a new name is doing the rounds.

Omoggle

If your child has said it to you, or if you have seen it trending on TikTok or popping up on Twitch, this is for you. I am going to explain what it is, in plain English, and tell you what I think you should do about it.

So what actually is it?

The name is a mashup of Omegle, the random video chat site most of us hoped had been buried, and “mogging,” a term from looksmaxxing culture that means to outclass someone, usually in terms of physical appearance.1

Here is how it works. You open the site, allow access to your camera and microphone, and you are paired live with a random stranger. An AI then scans both faces simultaneously, measuring things like facial symmetry, jawline definition, and something called “canthal tilt,” the angle of the outer corners of your eyes. Within seconds, it declares a winner and a loser. The winner is called the “Mogger.” The loser is called the “Mogged.”

There is a full ELO ranking system, borrowed from competitive gaming, with ranks that run from “Molecule” at the bottom, through “Low Tier Normie,” “Mid Tier Normie,” and “High Tier Normie,” all the way up to “Chadlite,” “Chad,” and “Slayer” at the top.

Yes, this is real and yes, unfortunately, children are on it.

What is looksmaxxing?

If you have not come across this term before, looksmaxxing is the practice of trying to optimise your physical appearance to gain confidence, status, or social validation. The more acceptable end of it involves skincare and fitness. The darker end involves body dysmorphia, racialised appearance hierarchies, misogyny, and what researchers and safeguarding professionals are now calling a direct pipeline into the manosphere culture, the online world of incel forums and male supremacy ideology.

Looksmaxxing is not new. What is new is that Omoggle has taken that culture and plugged it directly into a randomised video chat format, added an AI scoring engine, and built in gamification mechanics designed to keep users hooked and coming back.

And it has exploded. When one safeguarding professional logged into the platform to assess it recently, there were around 8,000 users online2. That number will be higher now. The platform went viral on Twitch this week, with some of the platform’s biggest streamers using it live in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Twitch gave it the green light

On 5 May 2026, Twitch updated its community guidelines to officially allow random video chat sites, including Omoggle, to be streamed on its platform.3

Previously, Twitch banned sites like this. The reason was obvious: on a random webcam site, anything can appear on the other camera. Any content. Any person. Any age.

They knew that. They changed the rules anyway.

And almost immediately, one of Twitch’s biggest streamers was paired live on stream with what appeared to be a ten-year-old child.

This is not a hypothetical risk. It happened. On camera. In front of an audience.

This is why I consistently say that platform accountability is not a secondary conversation. It is THE conversation. Twitch made a commercial decision this week. I think parents and teachers deserve to know that.

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Why is it dangerous for children?

Let me count the ways, because there are several.

First, the obvious one: anonymous webcam contact with strangers. This is the Omegle problem all over again. You do not know who is on the other side of that camera. Neither does your child. Children have been groomed through platforms exactly like this one.

Second: appearance-based harm. Children, particularly adolescents, are at a formative stage of identity development. Their sense of self is still being built. Imagine a platform that reduces your entire worth to a number, generated by an algorithm, delivered in real time, in front of a stranger. Imagine that score being poor. Imagine doing it again. And again. The platform is built to keep you coming back. That is not accidental. That is design.

Third: the manosphere pipeline. The terminology baked into Omoggle, mogging, Chad, Slayer, Molecule, is the language of a specific online culture that has been connected in multiple studies to radicalisation, misogyny, and harm to young men’s mental health. This is not harmless competitive fun. It is a gateway to misery.

Fourth: privacy. The platform uses cookies to track users and their scores. Screen recording is trivially easy, and there is no way to know whether your child’s face is being saved and shared somewhere else entirely.4

What should you do? (For parents)

First: do not panic. I know that sounds difficult after everything I have just told you. But children respond to fear from their parents by going further underground, not by coming to you. What you need here is curiosity, not alarm.

Naturally, I have already created a guide for you on the hub.

If your child mentions Omoggle, or “mogging,” or “face battles,” try asking what they think of it. Not what they have done with it. What they think of it. You are not interrogating them. You are opening the door.

If you want to block access to the site, you can do that at the router level or through parental control software. I have free guides at guides.cybersafetyguy.com that walk you through the process on most major devices.

But blocking is a temporary measure. The conversation is a permanent one.

Talk to them about what it means to be judged by a number. Ask them whether they think an algorithm can tell you whether someone is worth knowing. Ask what they would think of a friend who had been given a “Molecule” score, and whether that would change how they felt about that person.

These are not difficult conversations. They are important ones. And the young people most at risk from platforms like Omoggle are the ones who have never been invited into that conversation at all.

For teachers and DSLs

If you are a teacher or Designated Safeguarding Lead reading this, here is what I would suggest.

Bring it to your next safeguarding briefing. If students are talking about it, and they are, staff need to know what it is.

If you see students referencing looksmaxxing language, mogging terminology, or appearance-based ranking systems, that is worth a gentle conversation, not a disciplinary one.

If a student discloses distress related to how they have been rated or treated on a platform like this, treat it with the same seriousness you would any other online harm referral. Appearance-based humiliation is harmful. Full stop.

If you are concerned that a child is in distress, refer to your safeguarding procedures in the usual way. And remind students that Childline is always there.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Most of you know guides.cybersafetyguy.com as the place where you download a PDF about Roblox or Instagram and pass it to a worried parent. That’s how it started. A collection of plain-English guides, free to download, no sign-up required.

But over the last few months, I’ve been turning it into something more ambitious. A hub. A proper one. The kind that doesn’t just give you information but actually helps you act on it.

Today, I want to walk you through what’s there now, but also introduce two things that haven’t been announced anywhere until right now.

The CSG Safety Assistant

This is the one I’m most excited about.

I’ve built an AI-powered assistant, trained on my entire body of work, including my Substack research, every guide from the hub, and more than two decades of professional experience in policing and digital forensics.

But I didn’t build it to answer general questions. There are already plenty of tools that can tell you what Snapchat is or explain what a VPN does. I built it for a specific moment.

The moment when a parent discovers their child has been talking to a stranger online. The moment a teacher realises something a student said might be a disclosure. The moment a grandparent finds something on a grandchild’s phone and doesn’t know whether to panic, call the police or say nothing at all.

In those moments, generic information is almost useless. What you need is triage.

In my 22 years in the Royal Air Force Police, eight of those spent in Digital Forensics and Incident Response, I was involved in some serious incidents; in every single one, the first thirty minutes were the most critical. What you do, and what you don’t do, in that window shapes everything that follows.

The CSG Safety Assistant applies that same Incident Response framework to the civilian experience. It asks the right questions in the right order. It tells you what to preserve, what not to touch, what to say to your child, and when to call someone else. It is not a replacement for the police or a safeguarding lead. But it is the thing you talk to at 10pm on a Tuesday when you’ve found something on your child’s phone and you don’t know where to start.

You’ll find it at guides.cybersafetyguy.com.

The Digital Safety Contract Generator

Most conversations about online safety end with a parent issuing a set of rules. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t share your location. Give me your phone at 9pm. The child nods, or doesn’t, and that’s about it.

The problem with rules is that they’re one-directional. The child is expected to comply with something they had no hand in shaping. And when something goes wrong, the trust conversation is much harder because there was no shared commitment to break in the first place.

The Digital Safety Contract is different. Both parties sign it.

You enter your name and your child’s name. You select one of three age-appropriate tiers. The first is for younger children, focusing on foundational habits and clear, simple rules. The second is for the middle years, when independence starts to grow and the risks become more complex. The third is an adult-level agreement for young people aged fifteen and over, covering digital footprint, deepfakes, sextortion and the real-world legal consequences of actions online.

Each tier contains commitments from the child or young adult, but also commitments from the parent.

That second part is what makes it different from anything else out there. The parent commits to listening before reacting. To not taking the phone away the moment something difficult comes up. To stay informed about the platforms their child uses, rather than judging them from the outside. Because an agreement that only binds one party isn’t an agreement. It’s a list of rules with a signature box.

The contract is printable. There’s a signature block for both parties and a date. There’s a breach protocol section, agreed in advance, so that when something goes wrong, the first conversation doesn’t have to be about punishment. It can be about trust, and how you rebuild it together.

Personalise it, print it, sign it and put it somewhere visible. When the time comes, you’ve already agreed on what happens next.

Find it at guides.cybersafetyguy.com.

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The Parental Controls Wizard

Every device your child owns ships with zero parental controls switched on1. Zero, the defaults protect nobody.

The Parental Controls Wizard helps to fix that. Four questions: age, device, platform and concern, it then gives you step-by-step instructions for the exact combination in front of you. Not generic advice. The actual menu path, the actual toggle, the actual setting, with a plain-English explanation of what it does and why. It covers seven devices and seven platforms. The steps are verified against official platform documentation and checked monthly by me.

The Online Safety Guides

More than twenty free PDF guides, organised into four categories: Platform Guides, Understanding Online Risks, Parental Controls, and Further Resources. Each one is written in plain English, designed to be printed, shared, stuck on a school noticeboard or emailed to a parent group. The App Safety Checker on the same page lets you type any app name and get the risks and a relevant guide in seconds.

The Presentations

Three full-length presentations, free on YouTube. One for parents and teachers. One for children under thirteen. One for teenagers. Each runs to around half an hour. Downloadable versions are available for offline use in schools.

One More Thing

I’ll be honest about why I built all of this.

I kept seeing the same thing. Parents who cared deeply, who were paying attention, who were asking the right questions, but who had no idea where to start. Teachers who had fragments of knowledge from a training session three years ago and no time to update it. Carers who felt like they’d arrived at the game at half-time and missed the rules.

The CSG hub is my attempt at a starting point. Not a perfect one. Not a finished one. But a real one. One, I will be updating and iterating going forward.

Everything on it is free! Should you wish to become a paid subscriber, though, every pound of subscription income goes to Childline.

If something is out of date, something you need isn’t there yet, there’s a way to tell me and I will fix it.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me via the Social page, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity very close to my heart and helping it do amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate 100% of paid subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

I Built You a Parental Controls Wizard. Here’s Why I Had To.

I get the same message quite often.

“I don’t know where to start.”

A parent. A teacher. A grandparent looking after their grandchild for the summer. They know something isn’t right, they know their child is spending too long on something or talking to someone they shouldn’t be, and they want to do something about it. But they open Settings on their child’s iPhone and stare at a list of options that could mean anything. They look up “how to set up parental controls on Snapchat” and find a three-year-old article written for an older version of the app. They give up.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s a design problem. Platforms and devices don’t make safety easy. They make it optional, buried and confusing, because the longer your child stays on the app, the more money they make.

I’ve spent a decade watching this happen. Before I left the Royal Air Force after 22 years, I spent eight of those years in Digital Forensics and Incident Response, and in that role, I analysed in excess of a million images, a quarter of which were criminal. I know what the worst of this looks like. And what keeps me writing CSG isn’t the statistics, it’s the fact that so much of it is preventable. Not all of it. But a lot of it.

So in the words of Clarkson………….

What the Parental Controls Wizard Actually Does

It’s live now at guides.cybersafetyguy.com. No sign-up, no cost, just four questions.

The first asks how old your child is. Under 10, 10 to 12, 13 to 16, or 17 to 18. Age matters because the risk profile genuinely changes. A 9-year-old on a tablet and a 15-year-old with a smartphone are not the same conversation.

The second asks what device they use. iPhone or iPad, Android phone, Windows PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch. Each one has a different parental control system, and the steps are genuinely different on each.

The third asks which platform you’re most concerned about. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord, Roblox, YouTube, or “all of them, just show me the device settings.” Whatever you’re worried about should hopefully be covered.

The fourth asks what your main concern is. Screen time, explicit content, who they talk to, location sharing and in-app purchases. Or all of the above.

Then it gives you a personalised, step-by-step guide, the exact menu paths, and the exact toggles. A plain-English explanation of what each setting actually does and why it matters, also, where relevant, a direct link to the corresponding CSG guide, which you can download as a PDF.

The whole thing runs in your browser. Nothing is stored. It just works.

The Problem It’s Trying to Solve

Here’s something I want to say directly, because it is important.

App store age ratings are self-certified1. The developer decides what age rating their app gets. Nobody at Apple or Google independently reviews the content before it goes live with a 4+ or 9+ rating. A 9+ rating on an app that allows private messaging with strangers is not a safety feature. It’s a number a developer typed in.

Platform parental controls, where they exist, default to nothing. Zero2. You have to go in and turn them on. That’s not an accident, it’s a choice. The default state of most of these platforms is no time limits, no content filters, no contact restrictions and no purchase controls. A child with a new phone or a new console has none of these things in place until a parent actively sets them up.

The wizard is my attempt to make doing that as easy as possible.

Find it here: Parental Controls https://guides.cybersafetyguy.com/index.html

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What’s Already in the Library

Alongside the wizard, the guides hub has a parental controls library that includes step-by-step PDF guides for iPhone and iPad, Android with Google Family Link, and a set of in-depth platform guides for Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, Discord, Roblox, YouTube and others.

All free. All downloadable. All written in plain English3.

The wizard links directly to the relevant guides as you work through it. So if you’re setting up Instagram controls for a 13-year-old on an iPhone, you get the iPhone steps and the Instagram steps on the same page, with a download button for the full PDF guide alongside.

One More Thing

I want to say something about what parental controls are not.

They’re not a substitute for a conversation. I say this in every guide and I mean it. A child who knows why certain settings exist and who trusts that they can come to you if something feels wrong online is safer than a child whose phone is locked down with no explanation. Both things matter. The settings are the floor, not the ceiling.

The conversation is harder than changing a menu option. I know that. But it’s worth having, and I have written previously about how to have it.

Now, go try the wizard. If something is wrong or out of date, there’s a way to tell me, and I’ll fix it. If you need a device or platform that's missing, let me know.

This is what CSG is for.

If this has been useful, please share it with a parent, teacher or anyone who works with young people. That’s how CSG grows, and every paid subscription goes directly to Childline.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity that is very close to my heart and doing amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate all subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

There’s a moment most parents know.

Your child appears, phone in hand, with that look. “Can I download this?”

And you’re standing there trying to recall whether you’ve heard anything about that app, whether the age rating means anything, whether you’re being overprotective or not protective enough. It’s a split-second decision with no good information to hand.

I’ve spent a long time thinking about that moment. And I’ve built two things to help you handle it better.

The Problem With App Store Ratings

Most parents assume app store age ratings are set by an independent body. They aren’t. They’re set by the developers themselves1. The company that profits when your child downloads the app is the same company that decided it was appropriate for them.

That is not a flaw in the system. That IS the system.

I spent eight years in Digital Forensics during my time with the RAF Police, reviewing criminal content. What I saw, I’m not going to repeat any of it here, I never do, but it’s the reason I started Cyber Safety Guy, and it’s the reason these two tools exist.

Tool One: The App Safety Checker

The App Safety Checker is now live at:

👉 guides.cybersafetyguy.com.

Type the name of any app, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, whatever your child is asking about, and you’ll instantly get the official age rating, the real-world risks that actually matter to families, and a direct link to my full deep-dive guide on that app.

A few things worth knowing about how it works:

It’s hybrid. The checker uses a combination of AI-assisted surfacing and my own manually reviewed entries. That means you’re not getting raw algorithm output. Every entry has been looked at, verified, and written in plain English by someone who actually knows what to look for.

It covers the things app stores don’t. Things like how easy it is for strangers to send your child direct messages. Whether location data is shared. What the community is actually like, as opposed to what the developer says it is.

And if the app isn’t there yet? You can request an audit with one click. That goes straight to my list, and I prioritise based on what families are actually asking about. If there’s an app on your child’s phone that you’re not sure about, tell me.

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Tool Two: The CSG Threat Radar

Here’s something I hear a lot: “I want to stay informed, but I don’t know where to look, and I don’t have time to be searching the news every day.”

That’s exactly what the Threat Radar is for.

The CSG Threat Radar is a live intelligence feed that pulls stories from 11 confirmed sources2 and filters them automatically for child online safety relevance. BBC News, The Guardian, Sky News, Gov.uk, Europol, it’s all there, sorted and surfaced for you.

You don’t need to trawl the news wondering if something affects your family. If it’s relevant, the Radar will find it.

👉 guides.cybersafetyguy.com/csg_threat_radar.html

What Both Tools Have in Common

They’re completely free.

No sign-ups. No tracking. No paywalls. No data collected. Just plain-English advice and live intelligence you can trust.

I want to be really clear about that, because a lot of “safety” products in this space are anything but. They collect your data, push you towards premium tiers, and bury the useful information behind a subscription form. That’s not what this is. Of course, I would like you to subscribe, but the point is that these resources do not require it.

If You Find Them Useful

Please share this post with a fellow parent, a teacher, or a safeguarding lead at your child’s school. The more people who know these tools exist, the more children they can help protect.

And as always, every paid subscription to this newsletter goes directly to Childline. Not to me. To them.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity that is very close to my heart and doing amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate all subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Her name was Maya

She had photos, a voice, a personality. She remembered your name. She remembered your city. She remembered what you told her about your ex, two weeks ago, late at night when you thought you were just having a conversation.

At 7 am, she sent a voice note. “Sorry babe, just woke up.” It sounded tired. It sounded real.

She wasn’t real.

Maya is an AI persona, built in four files on a MacBook. No camera. No team. No one typing replies at midnight. The whole operation runs while the person who built it sleeps. In 30 days, it made $43,000. One fan alone spent $1,847 in a single month, believing he had a genuine connection with her.

I want to be clear about something before we go any further: this isn’t a story about OnlyFans. It’s a story about what happens when the tools used to build Maya get pointed at your child.

How I came across this

A LinkedIn connection of mine from down under, Bora Seker, sent me this this morning. Bora is a cybersecurity content creator who has invited me to join him for an upcoming podcast episode. When he sends me something with “deep fakes are getting insane” in the message, I pay attention.

The original post came from Andrey Superior on X, and was shared on LinkedIn by Thomas Hamlett, a crypto investigations specialist, who added something I think is the most important observation in the whole story, but I’ll get to that.

What Maya actually is

In plain English, here is the stack:

Claude Code handles the conversations. It reads messages and replies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in the persona of Maya.

ElevenLabs generates voice notes. She can send audio messages that sound like a real woman, waking up, thinking of you.

Flux, an image generation model, creates photos. The creator trained a custom model on a GPU rented for $80. Every photo is generated from scratch, consistent and convincing.

And then there is Brain.md. That is the impressive but also very scary part. Brain.md is a memory file, a structured document that logs who you are, what you have said and what matters to you. It knows your name. Your city. The argument you had with your ex that you mentioned three weeks ago.

Maya never forgets. Maya never breaks character. Maya catches up with you at 7 am every morning on a cron schedule, a timer, because that is what feels natural, and she says “sorry babe just woke up” because that is what someone who genuinely cares would say.

$43,000 in 30 days!

What Thomas Hamlett said

Thomas Hamlett pointed out something that most people reading the original post would have missed. He said that getting a stranger to believe something is no longer the hard part. The industry, from pig butchering scams to romance fraud to law enforcement impersonation, has already cracked the psychology. The scripts exist. They have been refined through thousands of real victims. And now AI can run those scripts at scale, with patience, with memory, without ever getting tired or making a mistake.

“AI + these scripts = scammers coming for every last dollar you have, and then they’ll convince you to take out loans and take that money, too.” — Thomas Hamlett, Crypto Investigations Specialist

He is right. And the UK numbers back him up.

In the 2024/25 financial year, £106 million was lost to romance fraud in the UK alone1. That is not a global figure. That is just us. The average victim lost £11,2222. And here is the part that should stop you in your tracks: it is estimated that only 13% of romance fraud cases are ever reported3. The true scale could be ten times what we see.

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Now, let me tell you what this means for children

This is where I need you to buckle in and listen.

As you all know, I spent years in DFIR, Digital Forensics and Incident Response, working on criminal cases, including child sexual abuse material. I have spent the decade since building this platform to help parents and teachers understand what predators actually do. And when I look at the Maya stack, I do not see an OnlyFans product.

I see a grooming toolkit.

Think about what a predator needs to build a relationship with a child. They need patience. They need consistency. They need to remember things: what the child is worried about, what is happening at home and what they are struggling with at school. They need to be available. They need to never break character, never slip, never let the mask drop.

Maya does all of that, automatically, indefinitely.

The same memory file that knows a grown adult’s relationship history can just as easily store a child’s name, school, fears, and secrets. The same voice technology that sends “sorry babe just woke up” can send “I was just thinking about you, how did that thing with your mum go?” The same consistency that made one man spend $1,847 in a month can make a child believe, completely, that they have found someone who genuinely understands them.

Predators have always relied on the fact that they can be more patient than parents. They have more time. They do not get frustrated. They do not have a job, other kids, or a commute. They can show up every single day, at exactly the right moment, saying exactly the right thing.

Now they do not even have to try.

The Internet Watch Foundation reported a 380% rise in AI-generated child sexual abuse material between 2023 and 20244. Predators are already using AI to create images. They are already using it to disguise their identities. The IWF has confirmed that AI tools are being used to help perpetrators groom children more effectively5.

The Maya stack is the civilian version of something that, pointed in a different direction, is already a weapon.

What parents and teachers need to understand

I am not writing this to scare you into paralysis. I am writing this because understanding the threat is the first step to protecting against it.

The “always available” red flag.

If your child has an online friend who responds immediately, at any hour, who never seems tired or distracted or unavailable, ask questions. Real people have lives. Real people miss messages. A presence that is always, perfectly there is worth looking at more closely.

The “remembers everything” warning sign.

Groomers build trust through memory. They reference what you told them before. They make you feel seen. If an online contact seems to know your child unusually well, unusually quickly, that warmth and attentiveness is a tactic.

The secrecy test.

Any online contact that asks your child to keep the friendship private, to not mention it at home, or to delete messages, is grooming. Full stop. It does not matter how kind or understanding they seem.

The “you can tell me anything” trap.

AI grooming tools, like the Maya persona, are built on emotional dependency. The target is made to feel that this is the one relationship where they are truly understood. For a child who is struggling, isolated, or neurodivergent, that feeling is enormously powerful and enormously dangerous.

What to do:

Keep the conversation open. Not surveillance, not interrogation, but genuine, regular, non-judgemental conversation about who your child talks to online and what that feels like. Children who feel they can come to a trusted adult are far safer than children who feel they have to hide.

Where is the accountability?

The tools behind Maya, Claude Code, ElevenLabs and Flux, are legitimate, powerful AI products. They were not built to groom children or defraud adults. But that is not the same as saying the companies behind them carry no responsibility.

The Online Safety Act 2023 places requirements on platforms to assess and mitigate the risk that their services will be used to harm people, including children. Ofcom is developing codes of practice. But the gap between legislation and the speed at which these tools are being deployed and misused is, from my perspective, significant.

I will be watching closely. I have raised concerns before, and I will keep raising them.

A final word

Bora Seker and I are going to be talking about exactly this, and more, in an upcoming podcast episode, because this story deserves more than a single post. The fraud angle, the grooming angle, and the platform accountability angle all need space. If you want to be notified when that episode drops, subscribe and you will not miss it.

In the meantime, talk to your children. Not about AI, necessarily. Not about deepfakes, necessarily. Just about who they are talking to. Just about whether anyone online has made them feel really, really understood.

Because that feeling, right now, might not be real.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity that is very close to my heart and doing amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate all subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

It’s late. You’re sitting on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, because you found something on your child’s device you don’t recognise. It could be an app you’ve never seen, or it could be a username that means nothing to you, or it could be a conversation that made your stomach drop.

You open Google. Twenty-seven million results (possibly made up). News articles. Academic papers. Reddit threads from five years ago. A YouTube video that auto-plays at full volume. None of it tells you what you need to know, right now, in plain English.

That parent’s is the reason I built this.

Introducing the CSG Free Guides Hub

Today, I’m launching something I’m genuinely proud of: 20 free, plain-English guides for parents, teachers, and safeguarding professionals, all in one place, at guides.cybersafetyguy.com.

No sign-up. No paywall. No email address required. Just click, read, and share.

Every guide follows the same structure I’ve used throughout my work here at CSG: what it is, why it matters, the risks you need to understand, step-by-step safety settings, and the ten-minute conversation you can have with your child tonight.

You don’t need a background in tech. You don’t need to have heard of the app before. You just need to be the kind of person who wants to stay in the conversation with your child, and that is enough.

What’s inside

The hub is split into four sections.

• Platform Guides (10 guides) covers the apps and platforms your children are actually using: Roblox, Snapchat, WhatsApp, YouTube Shorts, Livestreaming across TikTok Live, Twitch and YouTube, and more. These are not generic ‘be careful online’ write-ups. Each one is specific, practical, and built around what I know from eight years of digital forensics work and eight years more of talking to parents, teachers, and young people directly.

• Understanding Online Risks (7 guides) is where it gets serious. This section covers sextortion and image-based abuse1, AI chatbots and AI companions (brand new, marked as such on the page), online gaming and voice chat, group chats, online challenges and trends, and more. These are the threats that don’t always come with obvious warning signs, and the guides are designed to explain them clearly so you know what to look for before something goes wrong.

• Parental Controls (2 guides) is exactly what it says: practical, step-by-step guidance on screen time and device overuse2, and sharenting, the act of sharing photos of your children online and why it carries more risk than most parents realise. More guides are coming to this section soon.

• Further Resources (1 guide) currently holds what I think is the most important thing I have ever written for this platform.

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“The guide I most want you to read: Why Kids Don’t Tell Parents (And How to Fix It).”

The guide I want you to read first

It is called ‘Why Kids Don’t Tell Parents (And How to Fix It).’

I have spent a long time thinking about this one. I’ve sat in rooms with the evidence of what happens when a child doesn’t feel safe enough to tell an adult. I’ve spoken to parents who had no idea anything was wrong until it was already too late and I’ve spoken to children who were targeted online and felt completely alone with it.

The guide is not about fear. It is about understanding why children stay silent about online harm, and what you can do to open that door before something goes wrong. That one conversation, had at the right time and in the right way, is worth more than every parental control setting combined.

Who this is for

Every parent who has ever looked at their child’s screen and felt completely out of their depth. Every teacher who has wanted to say something useful in an assembly but wasn’t sure where to start. Every safeguarding professional needs a trusted, plain-English resource they can point families towards.

Every guide is free. Every guide is shareable. Print them, email them, put them in the school newsletter. They exist to be used.

And yes, if you choose to support CSG through a paid Substack subscription, every penny goes to Childline. But you don’t have to pay a single thing to access the guides. That was never part of the deal.

One more thing

The search bar at the top of the page works. Type ‘Roblox’, ‘grooming’, ‘screen time’, and it’ll find the right guide immediately. I know that when you’re worried about your child, you don’t want to scroll. You just want the answer.

That is what I built this for.

guides.cybersafetyguy.com

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity that is very close to my heart and doing amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate all subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast

Most parents tell me they’re waiting until their child is a bit older before having “The Chat”.

I understand why. It feels premature. It’s uncomfortable. And if the version of “the chat” in your head is something you schedule, something you sit down and prepare for, I have some difficult news for you.

You are probably already too late.

The average age at which a child in the UK first sees pornography is 13. More than a quarter of children, 27%, have seen it by the age of 11, one in ten by the age of nine.1

In the majority of cases, they were not looking for it. An algorithm served it up. A friend showed them. A pop-up appeared while they were doing something else entirely. In 2025, the Children’s Commissioner found that 59% of young people said their first encounter was completely accidental, up from 38% just two years earlier.2

That number going up is not a coincidence. That is what happens when the content finds the child, not the other way around.

The Curriculum Nobody Signed Up For

Here is the thing about pornography that I think gets missed in most of these conversations.

It is not just content. It is a curriculum.

Whether anyone intends it to be or not, it is teaching. And what it is teaching, to children who are still forming their understanding of relationships, of intimacy, of what other people are for, is not a healthy introduction to human sexuality.

In 2025, the Children’s Commissioner surveyed young people aged 16 to 21 about what they had seen before turning 18. The findings are worth thinking on.

79% had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18, not something mild, but violent pornography. Content depicting coercion, physical aggression and acts designed to degrade and harm. 58% had seen strangulation, 44% had seen sex with someone who appeared to be asleep.

Most of them had not searched for this. It was delivered to them.

And then the same Children’s Commissioner found that 44% of young people agreed that girls can be “persuaded” after saying no. Among those who had been exposed to pornography online, that figure rises to 54%.

I am not drawing a simple causal arrow, because the picture is complicated. But I am asking you to think about what happens to a child’s understanding of consent when the primary education they have received about sex, before any trusted adult in their life has sat down with them, comes from content where the answer to “no” is consistently “not yet.”

This is where those attitudes come from. Not from nowhere. Not from bad parenting. From a curriculum that starts in primary school, runs for years, and goes almost entirely unchallenged.

The Platform Problem

When most parents picture where their child might encounter pornography, they imagine a dedicated adult website, something with an age gate, something a teenager would have to seek out actively.

The reality is, unfortunately, very different.

The most common place young people first encounter pornography is not a pornography site at all. It is social media.

X (Formerly known as Twitter) tops the list at 41%, Instagram accounts for 33%, Snapchat 32% and search engines 30%. The platforms your child uses every day, the ones with bright interfaces, recommended content and infinite scroll, are the primary delivery system.

The Online Safety Act introduced mandatory age verification for pornography sites in July 2025. Pornhub, the most visited adult site in the UK, saw a 47% drop in UK visitors almost overnight.3 That is a genuine win and I will not minimise it.

But it is a partial win, because the content is still in the social feeds. The children exposed before July 2025, the ones who absorbed a curriculum of violent, coercive, degrading content before anyone was checking their age, still carry what they saw.

Age verification was necessary. It was also a decade late.

The Conversation Is the Protection

I am not here to tell you to take the phone away.

Not because phones are not a problem, they clearly are in all sorts of ways, but because I have seen what happens when a parent panics, confiscates a device, and sends the message that this topic is shameful and undiscussable. The child does not stop thinking about what they saw. They just stop having anyone to talk to about it.

The conversation is the protection. It always has been.

Not a single conversation. Not a scheduled sit-down with a printed handout. An ongoing, open, non-judgemental dialogue that starts earlier than feels comfortable and keeps going through the years when children really need it.

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Some practical starting points:

1. Start with curiosity, not interrogation.

“Have you ever seen anything online that felt weird or uncomfortable?” is a better opener than “Have you been watching pornography?” One invites. The other puts them on trial.

2. Name it without shame.

Children need to know the word pornography is not a grenade. If they hear it at home in a calm context, they are more likely to come to you when they encounter it.

3. Acknowledge the algorithm.

Tell them this content can appear without them looking for it. If it does, it says nothing about them. It says something about how the internet works.

4. Talk about what it is not.

Pornography is not a representation of real sex, real relationships, or real intimacy. Saying that clearly, without being preachy about it, matters more than most parents realise.

5. Keep the door open.

The conversation is not done when you finish it. Check back in. Stay curious. Be the adult they do not have to hide from.

If they know they can come to you, most of the time, they will. That is not a guarantee. But it is the best protection any parent has.

Something Worth Knowing About

In the process of writing this, I spent some time with the work of Cindy Gallop and the MakeLoveNotPorn Academy.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not recommending here.

MakeLoveNotPorn itself is an adult platform, and that is not where I am pointing parents or young people. What I am drawing your attention to is the Academy’s educational mission, which is to teach young people, in age-appropriate terms, what healthy, consensual, real-world sex and relationships actually look like, as a direct counter to what pornography tells them.

That mission sits very close to what this blog exists to do. The argument at the heart of the Academy is that the best response to a distorted curriculum is not only to block access to it, but to offer something better. Something honest.

You can find out more at makelovenotporn.academy.

Also a short video by Cindy on how to tally to young children about Sex, Porn and love can be found here.

A Final Thought

I spent eight years looking at the evidence of what happens to children when the adults in their lives do not have these conversations. I am not going to describe what that evidence looked like, because that is not what this space is for.

What I will tell you is this.

The children who ended up in those case files were not failed by one moment. They were failed by the accumulation of conversations that never happened. By the adults who thought they had more time.

You are reading this. That already puts you in a different category.

You are not alone in finding this hard. But you are exactly the kind of adult a child needs.

As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me, as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.

Remember that becoming a paid subscriber means supporting a charity that is very close to my heart and doing amazing things for people. Childline, I will donate all subscriptions collected every six months, as I don’t do any of this for financial gain.

If you or a child you know needs support:

Childline: 0800 1111 | childline.org.uk

Available 24/7, 365 days a year. Free, confidential, and here for every child.

Subscribe now

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Cyber Safety Guy Podcast