Safe on Social

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