Safe on Social

For the first time in human history, not in a generation, not in a decade, but right now, in real time, adults are not arriving ahead of children. They are arriving alongside them. Shaped by the same systems. Pulled by the same currents in architecture that was never designed to slow us down, never built to make us think, only to make us respond. The algorithms did not come for the young first. They came for all of us. What they have levelled is not just our attention. What t

From New Mexico to Global Regulation: Shifting Expectations of Platform Responsibility By Anna Hayes & Kirra Pendergast A Turning Point in Online Safety Seven and a half hours. That’s all it took for twelve ordinary people to unveil what decades of legal abstraction, lobbying, and child online safety spin had worked hard to keep hidden. Even more alarming is that this fog was not just maintained by platforms and policymakers. It was supported by a wider culture of reassurance

Warning - 18+ Only Contains Explicit Images If you have not heard of it yet, there is a good chance the young people in your orbit have. It is instantly available. You can access for three days for free then a subscription. It looks, at first glance, like a game. Colourful avatars, character roleplay, the warm familiar feel of a social app. It arrives through a TikTok recommendation or a friend's suggestion, and it is inside your child's world before you have had a chance

Every human library ever assembled, every act of courage and every act of depravity, every war and every love poem now lives in the glass rectangle your child carries to bed. The question was never whether they would learn from it. The question, the one we have failed to ask loudly enough for long enough, is who designed the lesson plan, what they wanted in return, and whether any of us consented to the curriculum. There is something that happens in the bedroom after midnight

Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Law. What Big Tech hijacked, what it cost us, and what actually matters now I grew up in Byron Bay. I was born in 1970, the same year Victoria became the first jurisdiction on earth to make seatbelts mandatory, and I remember 1977 the way most people remember yesterday. I have a mild form of hyperthymesia — I rarely talk about it — which means my autobiographical memory functions like a recording. Dates, conversations, the exact words some