From time to time, distressing or harmful material circulates online that children and young people may come across often without ever looking for it. When this happens, we write to you not to alarm you, but so that you are prepared and know what to do. We are deliberately not describing any specific material or naming anyone involved, and we ask that you do the same. Please do not go looking for it, and please do not name it in front of children. Why we ask you not to name

Five years ago, it was the occasional email. A handful of parents starting to ask bigger, harder questions of the organisations their children spend time with. Now that same question lands in my inbox almost every day. It comes from thoughtful parents wondering about consent forms — the "permission to publish" forms that decide where images of their children end up online. Dance, martial arts, the local footy club or school — it doesn't matter. The worry is the same. And lat

Nomi.AI built the perfect partner. It remembers everything, never says no, and according to its own paying users.......keeps trying to strangle them. ****Trigger Warning**** This article discusses violence and abuse. Support if you need Australia — 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 13 11 14 UK — Refuge National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247, Samaritans 116 123 US — National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233, 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline International — fin

***This piece describes self-harm and coercion. If you are worried about a young person, please reach out to a helpline or professional*** In May, in the Netherlands, a seventeen-year-old girl the world knows only as Dana was pulled from her bed in the dark. Six armed officers stood over her and her mother with their guns drawn. Two more moved through the house. Someone had told police there was a hostage inside, held at gunpoint. It was a lie. Days earlier, Dana had done on

Somewhere in Nairobi, a woman sits at a desk with nothing in her pockets. No phone, no bag beneath the chair, nothing she could carry out when the shift ends. On the screen in front of her, a clip runs for less than a minute. She tags it. A credit card on a kitchen bench. She tags that. A child in a bath. A prescription label. A person undressing, filmed from a bedside table by glasses left face-up and still recording. She tags them all and moves on. There are dozens of peopl

Earlier this week, Meta announced that people could generate images in Meta AI by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts they wanted to reference. In plain English, that meant someone could bring a public Instagram account into an AI image prompt and use public photos from that account as part of a new AI-generated image. After public backlash, Meta updated its announcement on July 10, 2026, saying the feature “missed the mark” and is “no longer available” (Meta Newsroom). T

A follow-up to “Instagram just changed the rules on your photos.” that has been read by 100K+ of you across various platforms. You can read it here for background. Meta has announced something in the last 24hrs called Muse Spark 1.1. Forget the name, because here are the most common questions I have been asked over the past few days and why it all matters. Question 1: Kirra, does this happen on Facebook and WhatsApp too, or is it just Instagram? Yes. It does. Not in exactl

A new Meta AI feature lets people turn public Instagram photos into AI-generated images. For a school, that is not a creative novelty. It is a safeguarding, consent and reputation issue - and the fix takes five minutes. Instagram has quietly introduced a new AI image feature that belongs on every school's and parents radar today. Meta's new model, Muse Image, lets people @mention Instagram accounts inside Meta AI prompts, so public photos from those profiles can be pulled i

I learned something new a few days ago, promptly forgot about it and then this morning I was poking around in a settings menu looking for something else , and there it was. I showed my partner, mostly as a “huh, look at this” and before I’d even finished explaining, he’d put his phone in my hand and said, “Quick. Do it to mine.” A simple setting change transforms any iPhone into something that feels a lot more like a dumb phone without buying another device. Nobody has to be

The way we've shared music has always been a small act of love. You hear a song that cracks you open a little, and you send it to someone with the quiet hope that it might undo them too. That's the sweet version. And Spotify's new messaging feature is being sold to us in exactly that language, a tidy, warm, a place to keep the songs and the people together.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 7757 on Monday 29th of June, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act. The KIDS Act pulls together the big child-safety proposals advocates have been fighting for — KOSA, COPPA 2.0, the SCREEN Act, the Safer GAMING Act, the SAFEBOTs Act — into one package. It brings default-on safety settings, real tools for parents, limits on the kind of targeted advertising that treats children like data points, new disclosure rules for chatbots

****Trigger warning - self-harm**** In May 2025, I sat down and wrote about a boy in a bedroom in Texas. His name was Bradley Cadenhead. He liked Minecraft. He watched gore. And somewhere in the space between the two, he had been jailed after building a Discord server called 764 — a place where cruelty was not hidden but celebrated, where children were lured into video chats and told to cut themselves, undress, perform, or else. I called that piece The Children of 764. I wrot

The good news is that the thing that keeps you safe was never your eyes in the first place. Artificial intelligence, we are assured, is here to help. And help it has. It has also automated the lie, industrialised the forgery, and made the impossible video call merely a Tuesday. We worry about the right things in the wrong order and miss the simplest fact of all, the first people to truly master this technology were never the founders or the futurists. They were thieves. Th

I have learned over the past few years that luck sometimes arrives disguised as something ordinary. For me, that moment came during a conversation in my car, as I drove my dear friend Maggie Dent and her husband Steve through the hills of Tuscany, just outside my adopted home of Florence, during their short stay with us last European autumn. Looking back, you realise the ground shifted right beneath your feet on a particular day, even though you never saw it in the moment. I

What AI companies really do with your most private conversations