Safe on Social journal
Perspectives on online safety, education and the digital world.
130 articles
9 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
If device makers become the authority that labels people as children, what stops an adult who wants contact with children from being labelled a child? On current evidence, this is a real gap, and almost no public guidance addresses it.A few years ago, over lunch in London, I sat across from a member of Pornhub’s senior management team. I had come to talk about one thing: the sheer volume of fetishised Roblox content on their platform. Roblox avatars, recorded in-game performing sexual acts, then
8 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
By George Peterkin - Managing Director of Mind Your Health and Founder SoS BEACON Sadly, conversations about the loss of three very young people has entered a great many Australian homes this past week. The subject has been all over our media, and a news story like this never stays where it started. It travels through social media feeds and school group chats, gathering rumour and half-truths as it goes, until it reaches a child alone with a phone or surfaces as a question from the back seat on
6 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
“We’ll just get them a dumb phone.”Parents and carers say it all the time, usually with relief. The hard decision has been put off and a simple one has taken its place. I understand that relief, and I also think the word “simple” does a lot of damage, because it closes the conversation at the exact moment it should open.Please let me explain before anyone runs to the comments section. Waiting is a valid decision, and for many children it is the right one. If your family has decided on no phone a
28 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
Free Robux, it says, but only if you claim them in the next few hours. There is a link, then a login box, and for a child who's been saving for a new avatar outfit since the last school holidays, there's little reason to hesitate.Next, the child types their username and password into a page that looks exactly like Roblox. Sometimes they are asked for their two-factor code as well, and they hand that over too, because as far as they understand it, that is what the code is for. Then the page quiet
24 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Most of us think of AI as something you ask a question and it answers. An AI agent (Agentic AI) goes further. You give it a job and it goes off on its own, clicking through websites and making decisions until the job is done. Nobody checks each step.On 18 June 2026, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, was testing one of these agents. Its job sounded harmless as it was told to find out how much the government spends on medicines. It went to a Medicare statistics website run by Services Australia.
18 Sept 2026 · 5 min read
The person at the next table never signed up for any of it. Snap has just announced its latest Specs, they are marketed as augmented reality glasses. The website is slick and clearly focused on making them a fashion statement. With a price tag of US$2,195 they are not an impulse buy, but we have said that about a plethora of other consumer tech when first released and five minutes later there was buy now pay later options. The feature list of Specs is like someone emptied the junk drawer of the
16 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
It is not hard to conjure up this vision in your mind, as you may have even contemplated it yourself. A complaint letter, often date-stamped as being sent late at night, when a parent may have spent the evening turning something over and over in their mind. It could be one of a million things that happened during the week prior, a phone call from the year adviser, a report comment that stung, a child who came home quiet and would not say why. Somewhere around 10pm, with the house finally still,
9 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
On Tuesday, the Government released its draft Digital Duty of Care, and with it a proposal that would let Australians switch off the algorithm. The Prime Minister has called it My Feed, My Way. I said publicly this week that algorithmic choice is the most consequential idea to enter Australian online safety policy in years, and I meant it. Then I read the draft, and the feeling I have been trying to argue myself out of for 24 hours is that, as it currently stands, this is a tick in a box, a qui
3 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
My inbox is full of the same question. Parents, principals, and wellbeing coordinators are all asking the same thing.Is this real? Could our government actually make the platforms turn the algorithm off?Here is what is on the table. Chanel Contos, who founded Teach Us Consent, used her National Press Club address to ask the federal government to make algorithmic feeds opt-in rather than opt-out. Her Fix Our Feeds campaign describes an experience that will feel familiar to anyone who was online
24 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Teaching is the only profession that requires you to front up in front of your abuser the very next morning, mark their work fairly, and keep them safe. If you know, you know.It is the morning after. You are in the driver's seat with the keys in your hand, and you have not started the car. You are not crying, not yet. You are running the words back, the ones a fifteen-year-old said in front of twenty-eight other children, and then the rest of it, the post that went up afterwards with a photograp
20 Aug 2026 · 4 min read
If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game.When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often use the analogy of so
18 Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Most of us have not slowed down. We have scrolled past it a hundred times and filed it under silly.If you have been anywhere near TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts in the last six months, you have seen them. AI-generated soap operas starring fruit people.A strawberry cheats on her husband with a banana. A jealous watermelon confronts a "gold digger" cherry. A garlic leaves his wife for giving birth to another mango. A pineapple child throws their strawberry sibling overboard. A pregnan
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