"The harmful impacts of unregulated technology on our children are something our educators and librarians have long been concerned about," said Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers, Massachusetts.
Carlo Tritta, 19, has been locked up for 28 months after pleading guilty to various offences including making indecent images of a child and sexual communications with a child.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced plans to restrict social media use by age starting on January 1, 2027, citing concerns such as problems sleeping, increasing anxiety, and social media platforms' addictive designs.
Victims' Commissioner Claire Waxman expressed her delight at the government's decision, stating that the change is long overdue and acknowledges the years of campaigning led by bereaved families like Tracey Hanson, who sought justice following the tragic death of her son Josh.
Australia became the world's first country to ban social media for children under 16 in December 2025. The ban blocks children from using Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and Kick, while WhatsApp and YouTube Kids are excluded.
Words such as 'relationship,' 'affair,' 'involvement,' or 'seeing each other' imply mutuality and consent. In the context of child sexual abuse, these implications are false. A child cannot legally or developmentally consent to sexual activity with an adult. Describing abuse using relational language risks distorting the inherent power imbalance and shifting perceived responsibility away from the adult perpetrator.
Eleanor Lyons, the independent anti-slavery commissioner, warned that sexual exploitation of women and girls is on a clear and sustained rise in the UK, with pimps using the internet to reach new victims and advertise them online with subscription platforms then acting as a gateway to abuse.
The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF) said online networks linked to a global ecosystem labelled the Com were carrying out extreme exploitation, cyberbullying, violence and abuse and called for a coordinated global response from governments, regulators, law enforcement and tech companies. The warning follows the publication of a report by the online risk consultancy Resolver in partnership with the MRF, which was founded by the family of Molly Russell, a British teenager who killed herself in 2017 after viewing harmful content online.
A man who threatened to rape a teenage girl and encouraged her to self-harm has been jailed. Shabaz Khokar, 24, from London, sent the threat to the victim in Staffordshire via social media, along with images of train tickets he booked to travel to her home. He was arrested at a railway station in the county in August when police were alerted.
Victims of deepfake image abuse have called for stronger protection against AI-generated explicit images, as the law criminalising the creation of non-consensual intimate images comes into effect. Campaigners from Stop Image-Based Abuse delivered a petition to Downing Street with more than 73,000 signatures, urging the government to introduce civil routes to justice such as takedown orders for abusive imagery on platforms and devices.