Safe on Social

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