Safe on Social

What schools, parents and educators need to understand about deepfakes, digital abuse, and the gap where real harm lives. Before you start reading this please know the information in this post is provided as general guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Every situation is different, and the legal frameworks governing work health and safety obligations vary across Australian jurisdictions. If you are a school leader, diocesan officer, or department representative

“You can improve yourself. You can be more”. “There are techniques, routines, tools that will sharpen the version of you the world currently cannot see”. And he watches. Of course, he watches. Because that is precisely what the algorithm was designed to ensure. What follows is not a single moment of radicalisation. There is no clear before-and-after. What follows is something far more insidious and far more difficult to reverse. What follows is the slow, algorithmic reframing

No young man wakes up one morning and decides to hate women. Here's what I keep saying to every parent, every teacher, every person who knows a young man who has been influenced by the manosphere or its fringe dwellers, asks me “how does that even happen” — well it doesn't happen the way you think it does. There is no single moment. No bad video that flips a switch. No influencer who reaches through a screen and rewires a boy's brain in an afternoon. It's quieter than that.

CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses a game that references child sexual exploitation and may be distressing to survivors of abuse. It contains frank discussion of how real-world criminal cases are being turned into entertainment for adolescents. A game is circulating among young people called Five Nights at Epstein's. It's being shared in group chats, traded between friends, and accessed on platforms where user-generated content slips past filters. This is not a rumour.

A fourteen-year-old takes a screenshot of a classmate's Instagram photo, runs it through a free AI app, and generates a fake sexual image. They share it in a group chat. A few mates laugh. Someone screenshots it. Someone forwards it. By lunchtime, it has reached people the original sender has never met. The fourteen-year-old thinks it's a joke. Under new amendments to the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW), effective 16 February 2026, it is a criminal offence. And the penalties are not sm