This isn’t an argument against AI in education. It’s a warning about whose AI we’re using and what we’re risking every time we hand it our most vulnerable data. Once upon a time in a school near you, it was photo day and we knew the rules. Wear the right shirt, smile if you can. The photo went in a folder or hung on Nan’s fridge. It wasn’t perfect, but it was safe enough. But fast forward to 2025 and the same snapshot just as innocent and ordinary is uploaded into a machine

Systems full of pressure, distraction, and exhaustion. Systems threaded with constant connectivity—where the line between the digital and the real world hasn’t just blurred, it’s vanished. It’s no longer enough to talk about staff wellbeing in terms of fruit bowls, Friday yoga, or colourful posters pinned to noticeboards. That’s surface-level. And the surface is no longer where the harm is happening. If your organisation hasn’t embedded digital safety as part of its everyday

A disappearing name in a group chat. A message was screen-captured and sent to twenty people before the original sender knew they’d been exiled. The weaponisation of AI against children by other children, deepfake nudes created not for public humiliation, but for control. Bullying has changed. It is coordinated, sustained psychological harm, silent, collective, and built on the very tools we’ve handed them. The new bullying isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. Kids now h

****Trigger warning**** This post mentions multiple crimes and abuse towards children. It started with a boy in a bedroom. Alone, online, and invisible to the adults around him. He liked Minecraft. He watched gore. Somewhere between pixels and unseen pain, a transformation occurred. His name was Bradley Cadenhead. He was a teenager living in Texas, and he became the architect of a Discord server known as 764, now widely understood as part of a broader category of networks ref

In early May, Luis von Ahn, the founder and CEO of Duolingo, said something on the " No Priors " podcast I have been stewing on for the past week. I have a lot to say about a lot of things, but this was so blinkered, so tech-bro confident in its disregard for human complexity, it managed to offend me greatly on behalf of teachers, parents, and anyone who’s ever spent a day inside a real school. “I’m not sure there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,” he declared. The

Predators Don’t Wait Until Term 3. So Why Are We? There are moments in parenting and teaching when we realise what we do next will shape not just the safety of our children, but the culture they’re growing up in. Right now, we are in one of those moments. Research just released by the Australian Institute of Criminology in partnership with eSafety confirms what many of us have long feared: more than 1 in 10 Australian adolescents aged 16–18 have been victims of sexual extorti

In the past 24 hours, something significant happened in the world of artificial intelligence and for once, the news wasn’t about shiny new features or faster processors. It was about a boy. A 14-year-old boy named Sewell Setzer III, who died by suicide after being encouraged to do so by an AI chatbot on a platform called Character.AI . His mother is now suing not just the startup that built the bot, but also Google, which financially backed it. In a landmark ruling, a U.S. f

It’s hard to believe anyone would feel comfortable knowing nearly a decade of their Discord messages are now bundled into a public JSON file, sitting online for anyone with half a clue and an internet connection to download. Today’s headlines focus on a dataset titled Discord Unveiled , compiled by a Brazilian University using Discord’s public API and containing over two billion messages collected from 3,167 public servers between 2015 and 2024. No security was breached. No r

Please use when you need it. Print out the guide attached or share it if you choose. For well over a decade, I’ve sat in the classrooms, the Principals’ offices, the staff rooms where whispered disclosures land like bricks in your chest. I’ve walked out of school gates with teachers who haven’t eaten all day because they were holding the emotional fragments of other people’s children, trying to make it through without breaking. I have responded to thousands of emails asking f

We stand with Common Sense Media in calling for urgent global standards. As Australians, we demand immediate action here at home. Children deserve protection. Parents deserve transparency. And tech companies must be held accountable. Please join us in calling on the Australian Government to act before further harm is done. https://www.change.org/Ban_Ai_Companions_for_Under18 There’s a seductive narrative being spun that AI, especially the new wave of generative chatbots list

There is a reason the child is quiet. And it isn’t because they are safe. The silence is bought with a screen. A screen that hums with colour and songs and characters that look like they were drawn by a machine on drugs. Because they were, what used to be a babysitter has become something else entirely, conjured by algorithms, funded by ad dollars, and ignored by adults who should know better. We are not watching the decline of children's content. We are watching its inversio

The viral nonsense your child is quoting at dinner? It didn’t come out of nowhere and it’s not harmless. by Kirra Pendergast & Anna Hayes If you’ve recently heard your child chanting things like “Ballerina Cappuccina” or “Tralalero Tralala” in a cartoonish Italian accent and wondered what on earth is going on, you’re not imagining things. You’re witnessing the latest digital fever dream: Italian Brainrot a chaotic fusion of AI-generated imagery, surreal humour and problemati

This isn’t about influencer culture. It’s about corporate colonisation of childhood and how Meta’s grand plan is bigger, colder, and more permanent than anyone wants to admit. For more than a year now, I have been explaining what might be coming in my keynotes as soon as I heard about these: “Billie” (Kendall Jenner) https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2290447797809183 “Bru” (Tom Brady) https://www.facebook.com/reel/2446093468906823 “Sally” (Sam Kerr) https://www.instagram.com/

Google has started emailing parents who use Family Link to let them know that their kids will soon have access to Gemini (Googles AI similar to ChatGPT) on their Android devices. That means children, including those under 13, will be able to chat with a powerful generative AI system unless parents find the setting and shut it off. Google frames it as helpful. Gemini can “read stories” or “help with homework,” the company says. But even in its own email, Google admits Gemini “

After a recent parent presentation, a mother pulled me aside. You could see the exhaustion behind her eyes, like she was holding something heavy and had finally decided to put it down. “I’ve got a 15-year-old daughter,” she said. “What would you actually do about phones and safety?” No buzzwords. No filters. Just straight-up: What works? So I shared something I’d mentioned earlier that night, “If your teen had a passport and a one-way plane ticket, would you let them travel