Why Online Safety Content Never Goes Viral
I need to be honest with you about something, because I think honesty is the only thing I’ve got left to offer some days and those of you who have followed and supported me deserve that.
Most of what I write about online safety will never go viral, it’s not because it isn’t good enough. It’s because the algorithms deciding what parents and teachers actually see were never built to reward calm, unfunny, uncontroversial safety content. There’s nothing funny about explaining how a predator builds trust over three weeks before moving a child off-platform. There’s nothing controversial about telling a parent to check their kid’s privacy settings. It’s just true, quiet, slow and platforms have no commercial reason to put that in front of you.
That’s the plain truth of it. Here’s what it costs to keep doing it anyway.
This work is hard. Not hard in the way people mean when they say “content creation is a grind.” Hard in the way that I sit down to write about grooming, or deepfakes, or a fourteen-year-old who trusted the wrong stranger online and I feel the immense weight of what I witnessed during the eight years in digital forensics sitting on my chest whilst I do it. I analysed over a million images during my time investigating criminal cases in the RAF Police. A quarter of them were criminal. I got no counselling for it at the time. I carry Complex PTSD because of it now and most weeks, I turn that back into a blog post, a reel, a guide, in the hope it stops one more child ending up as an image in the evidence.
Here’s the part I don’t say enough. Most of it goes nowhere and because I work in cyber, I know exactly why. But knowing why never makes it any easier.
I tag people with huge followings on reels about this. People whose reach could put this in front of a hundred thousand parents in a single share. I can see they’ve watched it. I can see the little tick that says they opened it, then nothing. Some of them are parents themselves. They scroll past a warning about their own children’s safety because it doesn’t fit the feed they’re building. If I’m honest, that's literally soul-destroying for me and there are times I have to fight an urge to just crumple and cry. Some people will call that unmanly and weak, I call it being human and actually being passionate about something. Something that most people will never have to view the real consequences of, I thank whatever God you believe in that you will never have to witness those things, but a little bit of me thinks that would make all of this much easier.
There are days this makes me feel like I’m shouting into a well. Like the mental health toll of writing this stuff, the toll on Colleen watching me disappear into it some evenings, isn’t buying anything back. I won’t pretend otherwise, because pretending is exactly the kind of content this newsletter exists to push back against.
But here’s the reframe I need to believe in, because it’s the only one that’s actually true.
We already know the platforms can build this differently. They’ve just never chosen to, unless someone made them.
In 2021, the Chinese government forced ByteDance’s hand on Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok. Under-14s were moved into a mandatory youth mode, forty minutes a day, locked out entirely between 10 pm and 6 am, fed a curated feed instead of an open-ended algorithmic one.1 It wasn’t a gesture. It was law, and ByteDance built it, because they had no choice.
Compare that to what TikTok offers everywhere else, including here in the UK. Softer default settings. Notification limits. Nothing close to a 40-minute cap, nothing close to a curfew, nothing lawfully mandated.2 The difference isn’t technical capability. ByteDance proved they can build a properly restrictive, child-safe version of their own product. The difference is that nobody outside China has forced them to, and a shorter session on your kid’s phone is worse for their advertising revenue than it is good for your kid.
⚡Please don’t forget to react & restack if you appreciate my work. More engagement means more people might see it. ⚡
Safe children cost platforms money. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the business model, and it’s the reason the Online Safety Act and Ofcom’s enforcement powers matter more than any individual post I write ever will, if they enforce it.
This was never going to go viral, and chasing that isn’t actually the point. The point is that somewhere, a parent who was about to hand their eight-year-old an unsupervised tablet reads this and thinks twice. A DSL who didn’t know what “youth mode” even means on Douyin, let alone what their own school’s safeguarding policy should say about AI and deepfakes, gets one more piece of the picture. That’s not nothing, that’s the whole point of me pushing on in the face of the algorithms.
I use the anger at the platforms and the ignoring of the famous to keep pushing, not to give up. I need to know I’m doing everything I can. Not everything anyone else could do with a bigger platform or a louder audience, just everything I can do with mine.
If you’re one of the people who does read this, share it, or send it to a parent who needs it, you’re not just being kind. You’re doing the bit the algorithm won’t do for me and giving me a reason to push on when my head says I should just give up.
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.
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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.
Multiple outlets reported ByteDance’s 2021 mandatory youth mode rollout on Douyin, including a 40-minute daily limit and a 10pm–6am curfew for under-14s, introduced in response to Chinese government regulation. MIT Technology Review, “How China takes extreme measures to keep teens off TikTok,” technologyreview.com, accessed 3 August 2026. Coverage is based on ByteDance’s own public statements and third-party reporting; exact enforcement rates inside China are not independently verifiable.
TikTok’s restrictions outside China, including notification limits and default screen-time prompts for teen accounts, are self-imposed by ByteDance rather than legally mandated, unlike Douyin’s government-enforced youth mode. Reporting comparing the two systems is drawn from multiple 2021–2023 sources including Engadget and the Chicago Journal of International Law, accessed 3 August 2026. Platform features change frequently; readers should check current TikTok settings directly for the latest configuration.