If device makers become the authority that labels people as children, what stops an adult who wants contact with children from being labelled a child? On current evidence, this is a real gap, and almost no public guidance addresses it. A few years ago, over lunch in London, I sat across from a member of Pornhub’s senior management team. I had come to talk about one thing: the sheer volume of fetishised Roblox content on their platform. Roblox avatars, recorded in-game perform

By George Peterkin - Managing Director of Mind Your Health and Founder SoS BEACON Sadly, conversations about the loss of three very young people has entered a great many Australian homes this past week. The subject has been all over our media, and a news story like this never stays where it started. It travels through social media feeds and school group chats, gathering rumour and half-truths as it goes, until it reaches a child alone with a phone or surfaces as a question fr

Most of us think of AI as something you ask a question and it answers. An AI agent (Agentic AI) goes further. You give it a job and it goes off on its own, clicking through websites and making decisions until the job is done. Nobody checks each step. On 18 June 2026, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was testing one of these agents. Its job sounded harmless as it was told to find out how much the government spends on medicines. It went to a Medicare statistics website run b

The person at the next table never signed up for any of it. Snap has just announced its latest Specs, they are marketed as augmented reality glasses. The website is slick and clearly focused on making them a fashion statement. With a price tag of US$2,195 they are not an impulse buy, but we have said that about a plethora of other consumer tech when first released and five minutes later there was buy now pay later options. The feature list of Specs is like someone emptied t

It is not hard to conjure up this vision in your mind, as you may have even contemplated it yourself. A complaint letter, often date-stamped as being sent late at night, when a parent may have spent the evening turning something over and over in their mind. It could be one of a million things that happened during the week prior, a phone call from the year adviser, a report comment that stung, a child who came home quiet and would not say why. Somewhere around 10pm, with the h

On Tuesday, the Government released its draft Digital Duty of Care, and with it a proposal that would let Australians switch off the algorithm. The Prime Minister has called it My Feed, My Way. I said publicly this week that algorithmic choice is the most consequential idea to enter Australian online safety policy in years, and I meant it. Then I read the draft, and the feeling I have been trying to argue myself out of for 24 hours is that, as it currently stands, this is a t

My inbox is full of the same question. Parents, principals, and wellbeing coordinators are all asking the same thing. Is this real? Could our government actually make the platforms turn the algorithm off? Here is what is on the table. Chanel Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, used her National Press Club address to ask the federal government to make algorithmic feeds opt-in rather than opt-out. Her Fix Our Feeds campaign describes an experience that will feel familiar to a

Teaching is the only profession that requires you to front up in front of your abuser the very next morning, mark their work fairly, and keep them safe. If you know, you know. It is the morning after. You are in the driver's seat with the keys in your hand, and you have not started the car. You are not crying, not yet. You are running the words back, the ones a fifteen-year-old said in front of twenty-eight other children, and then the rest of it, the post that went up after

If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game. When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often u

Most of us have not slowed down. We have scrolled past it a hundred times and filed it under silly. If you have been anywhere near TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts in the last six months, you have seen them. AI-generated soap operas starring fruit people. A strawberry cheats on her husband with a banana. A jealous watermelon confronts a "gold digger" cherry. A garlic leaves his wife for giving birth to another mango. A pineapple child throws their strawberry sibling

For years people have said that if we just had more self-control, were better parents, and set clearer boundaries, everything would be okay. They told us to be stricter, but also more relaxed, and to find a balance between the two. This way of thinking puts all the blame on the parents. It’s always been yy assumption that big tech companies are trying to shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto parents. They want us to feel guilty for not being good enough paren

This week the IWF released new figures on child self-reported deepfake abuse. This is what to do if you child or student says an image isn’t real. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and Childline released their latest Report Remove figures for the past six months last week. It is a service in the UK that lets under eighteens flag sexual images or videos of themselves and get them taken down. The sobering numbers that have been reported are that 420 of those reports are dee

On Monday 3 August the Australian eSafety Commissioner released its most detailed study yet of how children are using generative artificial intelligence. The report, titled Talking to Machines: Children’s Experiences with AI Assistants and Companions, is based on a survey of one thousand nine hundred and fifty children aged ten to seventeen, conducted between the second of February and the fourth of March 2026.Seventy eight per cent of the children had used an AI assistant su