“What do you think of the social media ban?” floated around the school gates last week as grown-ups waited for children to spill onto the playground in chaotic flurries. Personally I am so, so relieved. The thought that these platforms will not be part of my child’s life, at least for a long time, feels like a weight lifted. It’s not for you, I will say, and treat it like any other risk I work hard to keep them safe from. In the meantime, who knows what spaces will open up for better alternatives, allowing children and young people to connect and discover without threat, fear or danger!

Professionally, I know this is a hugely complex issue and the beginning of a long road of challenges and trade-offs.

What’s the latest?

Back in March, the UK government initiated a nationwide consultation “Growing up in an online world” which attracted 116,000 responses - a huge number for a government consultation - from parents, young people and interested organisations. I completed the parent survey and appreciated the nuances of exploring platform design, with questions covering addictive features like infinite scroll and options such as digital curfews for young people.

Top level results published in June indicated 9 out of 10 parents backed a social media ban for under‑16s, and two-thirds of young people agreed under-16s should not be allowed to use at least some social media platforms. On June 15th, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that from Spring 2027, under-16s would be banned from accessing social media.

But a week is a long time in politics.

Today, Monday 22nd June, Starmer announced his resignation after months of pressure and the UK faces having its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. At the time of writing there is no contest as to who the next PM will be: the “King of the North” Andy Burnham, returned to Parliament in a by-election last week that wasn’t even close.

Parents of young teens are in the eye of the storm. Will the government actually go through with a ban, or was Starmer trying to score political points as a leadership challenge loomed? Nothing is a given at this stage; Burnham is on the record saying he would be “certainly open” to age limits on social media, and his team have reportedly been ringing round for tech policy ideas for a framework that may look quite different to Starmer’s.

Regardless of the political situation, a ban is the direction of travel. The UK is not the only country implementing restrictions and there is a lot to learn from Australia which implemented their own ban in December 2025. With this in mind, let’s look at what the new PM’s team might consider over the summer.

Will a ban “work”?

The crux of the ban is an attempt to protect children from harmful content such as pro-suicide and eating disorder, prevent children from being approached/groomed/exploited through the platforms, and the impact of addictive features such as infinite scroll, beauty filters and rewarding children for risky behaviour in the pursuit of “likes”, as I’ve written about previously here.

Initial proposals reported are that under-16s will be prevented from downloading Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. Under-18s will be stopped from using “romantic” chatbots. Some gaming platforms are unaffected, as are messaging apps like Whatsapp and Signal.

Enforcement would involve a platform knowing how old a user is so content can be filtered, strangers cannot see or approach minors, and addictive features are switched off. This in itself gives rise to a new industry of age verification, where third parties work with platforms to verify a user’s age either by uploading an ID or facial age estimation software which involves uploading a photo. This in effect means everyone has to prove who they are, which has privacy and security experts extremely worried and many British people recognising that this is sneaking in a digital ID scheme by the back door.

Australia recently published a compliance update with some key observations on how their ban is working, with some very helpful early observations and lessons.

• 4.7 million age restricted accounts were removed, but a significant number of parents reported that their child still had access to their account.

• Although the “ban” is in place, children or parents won’t be punished for having one- this is to combat the finding that children might be put off reporting content or other users for fear their account will be deactivated, putting them in danger.

• The report observes both good and bad practices by platforms, and are already investigating Snap, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for potential non-compliance.

How have platforms reacted?

Unsurprisingly, platforms coming under the ban are not happy. Meta, YouTube and Snap have criticised the ban for pushing children to “less safe services” (although it’s hard to think of many services less safe). This has not been the experience of Australia, which has not seen a “significant migration to non-compliant platforms” largely because other platforms do not have a large user base of young people in the first place.

Companies may choose to make this process as difficult as possible by adding a lot of friction and clunky age verification to make the whole initiative extremely unpopular. Think of the much hated “click accept” cookie banners on websites, essentially companies interpreting the legal obligation to obtain consent in the most maddening way and making people hate data protection- one of the only rights-based pieces of legislation we have for the digital world.

What should the next PM do?

There is much talk of a “cliff edge” regarding restrictions, that when teenagers turn 16 they are launched into the online adult world with no experience. This speaks to the hanging question of why platforms couldn’t be made safer for everyone which requires less verification on our side and more work on their side. After all, adults are more likely to share misinformation than young people. Social media is only part of the ecosystem and there is much to tackle in terms of addictive design. When browsing my screen time settings I was shocked to see I had picked up my phone 130 times that day!

The next Prime Minister can pick up where Starmer left off. Where young people are concerned I’m a great believer that if you are going to take something away, you need to give something back. Instead of perceiving a “cliff edge”, the restrictions give children more time to learn digital literacy and media literacy. More offline time means investment in offline activities, the return of youth clubs and spaces.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to change the toxic digital culture we are living in by holding tech companies feet to the fire and supporting people to develop healthier relationships with technology and setting boundaries.

All of this is very difficult to relay at the school gates in the moments between pick up and drop off. Good luck to us all as the summer holidays approach.

One of the reasons I launched this Substack was to improve my writing, become a more disciplined writer and find a voice. I wanted to tell stories about how technology is woven into our everyday lives, expose the ridiculous narratives we are being fed with dry wit and English humour, and highlight the amazing people around the world who are pushing back and showing that it doesn’t have to be like this.

I rode the Substack wave, I realised I have a lot to say. I loved writing The Prompt opinion pieces (39 of them!) and now it’s time to slow down a bit and take it to the next level.

There’s a lot of work to be done.

In the UK we’ve just had local elections where the right wing has stolen a march- a pattern repeating itself across the world. Civil society is in a bit of a bind globally; we often talk about the “shrinking space” but funding cuts, anti-NGO laws, transatlantic tensions and the foreign interference that spurred cancellation of RightsCon in Zambia a few days ago is a reminder of the trouble we’re in.

And yet… we continue to hold powerful tech companies accountable, who seem to be vibe coding responses to human rights abuses facilitated by their products and platforms. Independent media is powerful and that’s why governments and tech companies want to destroy it. A friend from Hungary explained to me the importance of independent media doggedly exposing corruption that eventually led to Viktor Orbán’s defeat in April’s elections, and how paying for independent media is part of any Hungarian’s “digital expenses”.

I closed my Twitter account this year and it was a genuinely sad day. Supporting a new media ecosystem, one built for the public interest that doesn’t fund big tech’s war chest, is more important than ever. It’s as simple as signing up for a newsletter (and paying for it if you can). My go-to reads are Hard Reset, The Nerve, Internet Exchange and The Marmaldade Dropper. Regular posts from George Orwell’s extensive archive are a must for inspiration on political writing.

I’m no reporter and have no desire to add to the noise. I am in awe of all of these journalists and the risks they take every day to keep us informed and with agency. But I do want to contribute and do my bit (and I love to write).

The Prompt is going from weekly to occasional, but this means better and worth your time. I have many unfinished drafts to unfold: the Flo/Meta damages case (coming soon I hope!); going on an odyssey to find out if Palantir has my data; why nobody cares about data breaches anymore (looking at you Substack) and my journey to ditch US made tech.

So look out for that, and more. I’ve been learning to write, now it’s time to tell the stories.

To every subscriber who invited me into their busy inboxes, shared a piece or sent me a lovely message, thank you. I’ll see you again soon.

The whole archive is here to explore- from book reviews to the latest tech trends.

In the development of technology, scientists have often used women’s images and characteristics to test their latest inventions. I found myself wondering about that. Why? Was there an element of seeking companionship in the image and voices of women as these male scientists worked their long hours? A loneliness to it, perhaps. Maybe even a precursor to the AI companions we see today.

One that has stuck with me is the story of Lena Forssén, known in the world of computer science as the “Patron Saint of the JPEG”. This is one of the stories I shared in my talks, and why I return to it again and again as symbol of gender bias in tech and the importance of women being seen- for the right reasons.

In 1972, Lena did a shoot for Playboy magazine as the “Miss November” centrefold, naked but for stockings, a feather boa and an elaborate hat. The following year, a group of engineers at the University of Southern California were working on a new image compression algorithm, what would eventually become the JPEG standard. They needed a test image. They wanted something with a lot of visual complexity: colours, textures, detail.

Someone had a copy of the Playboy centrefold. And it worked beautifully, the complex textures of the image made it ideal for testing compression. I haven’t reproduced it here for reasons I will explain, but you can get the idea from the still below.

The scientists used it. It spread. Other researchers used it. It became, in the language of the field, an industry standard.

Lena’s face - and body - became the most reproduced image in the history of image processing. Replicated millions of times, appearing in research papers across the world, across decades.

For the women who were working in those computer labs at the time and women students in the following decades they had to walk past this image, work with this image, engage with this image. In research papers they were reading. In presentations they were sitting through. It was a constant reminder, in a field that was already profoundly male-dominated, that the culture around them saw women primarily as objects.

It is not clear when Lena herself found out about the use of her image in this context. She was not asked. She was not compensated.

You might wonder what Playboy magazine thought of all this from a copyright/image rights angle. From what I understand, Playboy only became aware of the use of the image in 1991 when the image appeared on the cover of Optical Engineering magazine and they sent a notice to the publisher regarding the unauthorised use and copyright infringement.

But, they ultimately decided to overlook it. A few years later, VP of new media at Playboy told Wired magazine,

“We decided we should exploit this, because it is a phenomenon.”

Note the use of the word exploit there.

A long campaign by Lena herself and by women’s organisations in the computing field, plus a short documentary Losing Lena eventually bore fruit. Hundreds of universities pledged not to use the image. And in 2024 (2024! Fifty years later!!) the IEEE Computer Society, one of the leading organisations in the computing field, announced that they would no longer accept research papers containing the image.

And importantly, the decision went further than just one image. There was an explicit call for a more thoughtful and sensitive approach to the images used throughout research, because the culture that allowed Lena’s image to become standard is the same culture that creates barriers for women entering the field.

In the age of AI I think about the contribution of women and how much of the warnings that are now everyday knowledge have come from women- sounding the alarm over concerns that AI models reflect existing biases, with an outsized impact on women and marginalised communities such as Abeba Birhane, Joy Buolamwini, Karen Hao, Meredith Whittaker, Kate Crawford and Sarah Myers West; Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell for their seminal reports, books, advocacy and leadership.

It is depressing to think of all the ways certain groups have been excluded from technological decisions. When an entire category of person is systematically absent from consequential decisions, you get systematic blind spots. The harms that feel abstract to the people in the room tend to be the harms that fall on the people not in the room.

I’ve said that Lena’s image became “the industry standard”. Who decided that? Who looked at this choice and thought, yes, this is fine, this is what we’ll all use, this is what research in this field looks like?

Think about what might have been different. If women had been present and empowered in the room in 1973, would a Playboy centrefold have become an industry standard that their female colleagues had to navigate for fifty years?

We cannot know. But we can ask the question. And asking it is the beginning of something.

The campaign points to “distractions” that have led to reading for pleasure declining across age groups. The subtext is the mixed impact of social media on reading and writing, the subject of several research studies. While social media can help uncover new writers and books, it can also steal time and shorten attention spans.

Analysing the harms of technology is my day job. I live with a primary school age child who is tech-curious. I try to take each opportunity that arises to spark a conversation not just about how technology works, fits into our lives, but also how to deal with how it might make you feel and the importance of getting offline and…breather now! It’s overwhelming to say the least.

Luckily, there are a lot of books out there aimed at children about technology and seemingly tailored to different and completely personal parenting styles and choices, so you don’t feel funnelled into one direction. I currently gravitate to the ones that are about technology more broadly rather than devices (although that will change in years to come I imagine), and a focus on problem solving, critical thinking and self esteem. I like a good balance of words and illustrations so it doesn’t feel like a textbook- and I like to learn something too of course.

These are the ones I’ve collected over the years, I would love your recommendations.

Ada Lovelace Little People, Big Dreams (2018)

Who are you if you don’t have a “Little People, Big Dreams” book written about you? This very popular series goes back to the childhood of a well known figure, the moment they had their big idea, how they overcame adversity and made the big idea happen. There are now over 100 books in the series from Beyonce to Mother Teresa to Steven Spielberg, so whatever a child is into, there is an inspirational figure to help them explore their dreams and ideas.

I’ve had mixed experiences with the series; the story of Emeline Pankhurst described suffragette activities in more violent detail than I was expecting for the audience, which freaked out the 6 year old I had given it to for Christmas. So I was a bit wary there might be something leftfield about Ada being Byron’s daughter and what THAT must have been like, but the Ada Lovelace story is very good and age appropriate for the 4-7 reading age. It focuses on her love of problem solving and how she built on the capabilities of Charles Babbage’s calculator, writing the first algorithm in the process. There’s also a good timeline and facts at the back.

Widely available in libraries and can be bought online second hand for a few pounds.

The Braniac’s Book of the Internet (2025)

This is a stand out for me and one I’ll return to again and again. Some of it is a bit text-booky which will be more beneficial in a couple of years for us, but I love the illustrations, the facts and how various concepts are explained, from how humans have communicated through time to introducing AI. The section on spotting fake content is incredible and led to a great discovery adventure and discussion about the relationship between the crocodile and the plover bird. I tell you, I had some assumptions dashed about that! A great mixture of technical facts and critical thinking skills, improving the ability to analyse facts and making informed choices.

It’s a more recent publication, but I managed to pick up a second hand copy online.

Little Bird’s Internet Security Adventure: A First Guide to Internet Security for Preschoolers (2010)

A confession- I bought this book at a cybersecurity conference years before I had children. It is published by the Czech cybersecurity company AVG Technologies which merged with Avast, so it is essentially an attempt at marketing but it covers safety issues well without screaming “download our anti-virus solution!!”

The book was still in its cellophane wrapper until relevantly recently when I felt it was time. It was published in 2010 and has a Skype-feel to the illustrations but the advice lands, essentially what to do if you see something you don’t like online and reinforces the message of “if you ever need help, turn off the computer and tell your parents”. I like how that emphasises ownership and control of your online experience.

As the book is a little old, picking up a second hand copy online is probably the best bet. I’m sure there are more recent publications that do the job- let me know if you’ve found a good one!

All About Worries and Fears (Usborne 2022)

Usborne publications are a good indication of quality in my experience. This is probably not an ideal bedtime read, but a book to pull out in certain situations to help young children recosgnise fears and anxieties and talk about them. For parents there are notes about how to talk to children about anxiety and help build resilience- useful skills all round when dealing with the online world at any age.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go (Dr. Seuss 1990)

If you are a family reading/watching “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” all year round, this is definitely for you. A good friend gave me a copy before I went travelling in my twenties- I hear it is also a popular graduation gift. The last poem written by Dr. Seuss before he died, it is a gorgeous swirling ode to life’s adventures, to getting outside and out of your comfort zone:

“You have brains in your head

You have feet in your shoes

You can steer yourself

any direction you choose..”

A poem about all of life’s glorious choices, mistakes and successes. Things won’t always go your way but you’ll be fine. It is challenging to read without welling up a bit:

“On and on you will hike

And I know you’ll hike far

and face up to your problems

whatever they are…”

Happy reading!

This week a jury in California found Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products that harmed a young woman’s mental health and led her to suffer depression and body dysmorphia after becoming hooked on social media from the age of six years old.

A “bellwether” trial for social media, this was the first in a series of class action lawsuits involving hundreds of complainants kicking off this summer which could have seismic consequences for the industry.

Big tech is on its way to joining big oil, big pharma and of course big tobacco in the public psyche, particularly around how companies have dealt with the knowledge their products are harmful. Many are calling the verdict a “big tobacco moment”, but what does that mean and how relevant is the comparison?

The “big tobacco moment” describes a turning point for companies facing accountability for the harms of their products. It’s particularly relevant in this case because of the harms to health but also the addictive nature of products.

The “big tobacco moment” wasn’t really a moment. Scientists linked lung cancer and heart disease to smoking in the 1950s, which spurred a flurry of legal cases from individuals suing tobacco companies for damages related to the effects of smoking. Up until the 1990s there were 800 of these cases, and every single one was lost.

In the late 1990s, more than 40 U.S states got together to sue tobacco companies for the costs of treating people with smoking related illnesses and this time they won, resulting in a national settlement to the tune of $365.5 billion to cover state medical costs. Smoking was forever changed in the national psyche.

There has been a lot of heat over the years around online harms and the role of online platforms but this verdict - along with the verdict in New Mexico that Meta made false and misleading statements about the safety of its platforms and the 2022 inquest verdict that the negative effects of online content played a part in the death of British teenager Molly Russell - is chipping away at corporate denials.

The $6 million damages paid to the young woman known as KGM in the Meta/YouTube trial this week (Snap and Tik Tok settled before the trial) might be chalked up as the cost of doing business, but damages could soon rack up (the New Mexico case awarded damages of $375 million) as cases get underway across America and potentially the rest of the world.

In addition to the sheer number of cases and damages so high even the biggest companies in the world may have to rethink their “cost of doing business” strategy, what other similarities are there with the “big tobacco moment” and what could the comparison mean for the future?

It’s addictive and they know it, because they designed it that way

In 1994, seven tobacco company CEOs testified together before the U.S congress and each in turn, under oath, declared “I believe that nicotine is not addictive”.

When the CEO of Instagram took the stand back in February, he was careful to describe KGM’s use of Instagram for up to 16 hours a day “problematic” and skirt the concept of addiction.

Last night I watched The Insider, the 1999 film of the story of Dr Jeffry Wingard, a former tobacco company executive turned whistleblower, who revealed in court and on the show 60 Minutes that CEOs knew nicotine was addictive and not only that, they enhanced the effect of nicotine by adding other chemicals, known in the industry as “impact boosting”.

A parallel could be drawn with features of social media, added in to encourage compulsive use such as infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations and notifications.

The contributions of whistleblowers

Dr Jeffry Wingard was key to the “big tobacco moment”, revealing that tobacco companies knew cigarettes were both addictive and dangerous.

There have been countless whistleblowers from Meta employees over the years across products such as virtual reality, Instagram, and relations with China. In this case, those that focused on the harm to young people including Frances Haugen, who testified that Facebook leadership knew about negative impacts on teen’s mental health, and Arturo Béjar, an engineer who testified that Instagram leadership ignored warnings that young teens were receiving unwanted sexual advances on the platform, were key to driving this landmark trial.

What could happen next…

Ban on marketing and sponsorship

One of the outcomes of the 1998 settlement was a restriction on marketing and sponsorship, especially targeting youth. It would be interesting to see how this played out, less the weird sport sponsorships and more that Meta and Google are big sponsors of many digital rights events and conferences, which could have a real impact on the sustainability of those events.

It will be very interesting to see how the verdict and possible restrictions plays out with advertisers themselves, the lifeblood of social media profits. Will they leave in droves? Probably not, unfortunately.

You caused the harm, you pay for it

The “big tobacco moment” was U.S states holding tobacco companies liable for causing a public health crisis and suing them for the costs of treating people with smoking related diseases. Could we see something similar here where bold governments sue online platforms for the costs in treating the growing mental health crisis among young people, which many experts attribute to social media use?

A health warning on all products??

Imagine a banner across all platform’s home screens warning of the dangers to health!

How this relates to proposed social media bans for under 16s…

Several countries are mulling over a ban on social media for under 16s (including in the UK which is consulting on it right now!)

Over the years, incremental rules have been established to protect children from taking up smoking. From 1908, smoking was restricted to over 16s. In the UK, that was raised to over 18s in 2007, then in 2024 a ban for those born after 2009.

Another outcome of the 1998 settlement was that tobacco companies had to stop targeting young people, as children hooked on smoking turn into adults hooked on smoking.

Internal documents revealed during Meta and YouTube’s trial revealed that engaging teens was a “top priority.” Another whistleblower, Kelly Stonelake, wrote,

“An internal Meta analysis titled “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones are the Best Ones” found that children who join Facebook as tweens have three times the long-term retention of adult users, and explicitly directed the company to “prioritise tweens over all other age groups.”

Google and Snapchat were keen on infiltrating schools and “bedtime routines”. That cannot be allowed to become a norm.

Part of the rules for the sale of tobcco products is that they are hidden from view in the shops and the packaging is plain. What could this look like for social media? Ditch the beauty filters?

The battle is won but not the war…

This verdict is such good news because it opens the door for all kinds of research and inquiries that goes beyond social media (such as this one studying the effects of digital devices on brain development).

While the current crop of trials are in the U.S, governments around the world might be braver- all the floated policies, like making “addictive design” a systemic risk under the EU Digital Services Act- might make its way to the top of the pile.

The tobacco industry evolved into other products such as menthol and vapes, where business is booming. The tech industry is evolving their AI products at speed with many of the same harms.

The Big Tobacco Project from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism continues to uncover scandals to this day. Ultimately, it is not possible to make smoking safer. Is it possible to make social media safer?

There is still a long way to go but it is worth remembering that from the 1950s to the 1990s, tobacco companies never lost a legal case brought by individuals. For online platforms, the case brought by KGM is a huge one to lose.

Note: I am interested in delving further into the analogies between this case and the “big tobacco moment”. If you are interested in contributing to a feature on this topic please do get in touch!

I’m taking a break for a couple of weeks, back in your inboxes on the 17th April.

I really thought I knew all I needed to know about the “manosphere” (a misogynistic bunch of men promoting “real” masculinity via online platforms that gets very dark) but this caught my eye because it was made by Louis Theroux. I am of an age to have grown up with Louis Theroux, a British documentary maker mostly seen on the BBC. Theroux’s persona is the nerdy, bumbling British guy who is no threat to his subjects so gets great access, but is actually very smart and delivers the killer question at the right moment, catching people off guard and revealing things they probably thought they wouldn’t.

In the 90s Theroux dived into fringe communities for the “Weird Weekends” series, travelling to far flung corners of America to live alongside and interview survivalists and porn stars and “whites only” communities in South Africa who refused to acknowledge the end of apartheid. He went on to do some very high profile interviews, most memorably and disturbingly Jimmy Saville, later exposed as a vile abuser. His films continued on the dark path, getting to know Scientologists, West Bank settlers and members of the Westboro Baptist Church, best known for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers. In short, he is very experienced in dealing with the fringe and the frightening.

I am also of an age to have grown up with “The Game”, the precursor to the online manosphere we live with today. The Game was a 2005 book by Andrew Strauss, an investigative journalist who went undercover to learn about groups of men running the “seduction industry”, particularly a man calling himself “Mystery”, who hosted courses and bootcamps “teaching” men how to attract women. Aimed at young men struggling to fit in, form relationships or talk to girls, Mystery convinced these men that he knows what women want, how they want to be treated, and he would tell you- for a fee. Sound familiar?

Instead of being the ultimate exposé, the book actually ended up as a how-to manual of toxic pick up techniques, described as “the single guy’s bible” in reviews, a New York Times bestseller that filtered into our culture.

I had friends at the time who literally bought into this and started openly “negging” girls on nights out. The centrepiece of The Game, “negging” is a manipulative technique involving paying a woman a backhanded compliment who then, apparently, hangs around in order to seek the man’s approval and, I guess, sleep with them. Sample neg: “Wow, you look amazing- who’d have thought that dress would suit you.” It was utterly boring, weird and awkward but it spread.

Twenty years later, social media has turbocharged the manosphere (and negging is still big on TikTok.) The real world effect is an increase in violence and harassment against women, and boys refusing to be taught by a female teacher at school. Entry points for discovery were the pandemic lockdowns and an interest in fitness videos which has brought boys and young men in droves to the feeds of influencers such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. The ultimate pyramid scheme, it spawned more and more influencers, like those featured in Theroux’s documentary.

Influencers are highly aware of the attention economy, what gets attention online and prioritised by social media algorithms. A new campaign by UN Women UK to tackle the influence of the manosphere states 73% of boys aged 11 to 17 regularly encounter manosphere content, with 59% saying they come across it without actively searching for it- a result of social media algorithms “recommending” the content to them.

These influencers may get notoriety for their monstrous talk about women (and let’s not forget the most notorious, Andrew Tate, is charged with rape and human trafficking in the UK) but their channels and social media feeds largely go like this:

Crypto ad

Download this investment app that made me rich

Selfie next to a swimming pool

Buy my course to learn how I got rich

Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote etc.

Crypto ad

Selfie driving or standing next to a flash car

And repeat

How would Theroux fare in this world? All of his previous experience means nothing to the target audience of the featured influencers as they have no idea who he is. Is this the ultimate clash of content creators?

Before the documentary was finished or announced everyone knew Louis Theroux was making a documentary on the subject for Netflix. One of the featured influencers (I honestly can’t even bear to repeat their names) asks his followers who Theroux is and is it going to be a “hit job”? Yes, say his followers. OK, then he’ll be ready. Game on.

The film is less focused on the platforms themselves but I learned a lot about what gets monetised and how they make money, seemingly lots of it. The irony is these people are terrible with money, making questionable financial decisions (spending $20,000 a month on rent for a city crashpad seems completely unsustainable to me) and relying on a fragile and desperate ecosystem they are in no way in control of, thinking they can game an algorithm forever.

They don’t make money from the get rich quick schemes they advertise, of course, they take a fee or a cut for selling them. Theroux deposits £500 into one investment platform and loses it all.

The film really has its moments in revealing the contradictions and confusion of the manosphere: claiming to know what all women want while being simultaneously disgusted by the women they are attracting. Practising “one-way monogamy”. One influencer boasts that his girlfriend packs his condoms when he goes on a trip. Shortly after this she packs up her things and leaves him for good.

Yes, there are women in the doc. I cannot stop thinking about them. I would have loved to have seen and heard more from these women but the men seemed very nervous when any woman was on screen… The blonde in a swimsuit who introduces herself with her OnlyFans handle and laughs when the influencer says she’s his cleaner. The girlfriend and mother of another influencer’s 2 children with another on the way. The lack of financial security and independence for her bothers me- this man could walk out on her and the kids at any moment with no consequences. Where are the “traditional values” in refusing to marry the mother of your children?

Theroux’s whole style is slowly building up the story, the plot, and coming in at the end for the kill shot. This does not work with today’s content creators out for clicks and rage bait. There is a parallel universe going on- the BBC is filming the documentary while the influencers live-stream the filming of the documentary.

Conversations are clipped and shared to make Louis Theroux look “owned” with exchanges like:

“Are you mates with Jimmy Saville?” “Well, actually, I helped to expose…” Do you think Israel is committing genocide?” and so on. And it kind of works.

It is heartbreaking to see young boys rush up to these people in the street for selfies and fist bumps. Once they have grown up and realised it’s a scam, there’s another batch coming right behind them.

I think we’ve seen enough now. Let’s stop giving these bozos airtime and focus on the women they harm and the boys they scam who really need our attention.

On the eve of International Women’s Day, let’s remember a young woman and her family who are sparking a reckoning for social media safety.

In November 2017, 14 year old Molly Russell from Harrow, a suburb of London, UK, took her own life in the middle of the night. Her parents discovered that Molly had viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self harm on social media, particularly Instagram and Pintrest. Her father, Ian Russell began a campaign to remove harmful content from social media, and the family set up the Molly Rose Foundation.

At the inquest into her death, the coroner ruled that Molly had died following an act of self harm brought on by depression, and the results of social media consumption.

This landmark ruling is the narrative running through the documentary Molly vs The Machines. While the film is very very sad, it is smart and educational. It pulls heavily from Shoshana Zuboff’s doorstop of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” to explain how and why Molly was targeted with over 2000 pieces of content that fed her depression and insecurities, drawing her into a spiral she could not escape.

On Sunday I helped to organise a community screening of Molly vs The Machines in my community. I’d seen a post by the film distribution company, Cosmic Cat Films, offering community cinemas a copy of the film to premiere at 7.30pm on Sunday 1st March. This was part of a simultaneous, country-wide screening with over 50 cinemas taking part and premiering at the Glasgow Film Festival at the same time. I felt this was quite a statement and I wanted in.

Around 30 people gathered at the village hall, way more than I expected! The demographic of my community skews more towards grandparents- I was hoping that more parents and teenagers would come and publicised the film locally as much as I could through the schools and mum’s WhatsApp groups. I even saw a poster in the local butchers and heard the local MP had been promoting it at a town hall meeting!

As I said when introducing the film, we are living through a moment. People are understanding more about how social media works, that it is designed to hold our attention at all costs. There is a social media consultation in the UK (more of that later), smartphones are being banned from schools (I was pleased to see people from the local chapter of Smartphone Free Childhood at the screening) and there are landmark trials in the US underway about social media addiction which could have seismic impacts. Even though the companies are global with a lot of money and very powerful, the impacts are felt on a deeply local level. I wanted the screening to serve as a way to bring people together, to get to know and support each other- and who knows what might come of it!

We also took advantage of the offer to screen a filmed Q&A which took place last year with Molly’s dad Ian Russell, the film maker Marc Silver and two of Molly’s friends who feature in the film. The Q&A was moderated by investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, known for her incredible work on exposing Cambridge Analytica and currently writing for the brilliant Nerve newsletter.

Molly’s friends are a standout. In the Q&A, one admits she is still on Instagram despite everything that’s happened, hinting at its addictiveness, and describes being shown content glorifying anorexia when searching for healthy eating advice on TikTok. Ian Russell is adamant that young people need to be part of the conversation and he is absolutely right- these insights are crucial.

On Monday March 2nd, the day after our little local premiere, the UK government published a national consultation about social media and the proposed ban for under 16s. There are three surveys to choose from: a full one aimed at charities and civil society organisations, one for parents, and one for young people. Please, please circulate the one to young people to people you know aged between 10-21, it is so important. They are all available by following this link.

I have completed the parent survey and was impressed by the nuance, really digging into what we want from technology for society. The survey highlights potential issues with social media features, such as infinite scroll and likes for validation and whether apps should be blocked overnight (Molly took her own life after viewing content late into the night.) I suspect that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would have to do some of the heavy lifting here, and that’s going to be…interesting.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m not in favour of a blanket ban- it lets companies off the hook as they wouldn’t have to make huge changes to their business model. I want to see social media made safe for everyone, and that is going to involve a complete redesign from the ground up.

It is a clever strategy by the makers of Molly vs the Machines to have this country-wide premiere ahead of the consultation launch, and then screen the film on TV (Channel 4) during the week on Thursday 5th March. I hope it is viewed far and wide.

In a scene reminiscent of the Netflix drama Adolescence, Molly’s father says that when your children are home and in their bedrooms, you think they are safe. Molly had insecurities and worries like every 14 year old girl in history. As her father says, she should have been allowed to work through this in private. Not be bombarded with content that fed and validated her darkest thoughts.

It is often hard to know what to do about these huge problems, but we can chip away on a local level, in our communities, schools, and by listening to our young people. On International Women’s Day, let’s think of Molly and her family and listen.

And do the government survey.

Writing about the current state of technology and human rights every week can feel pretty intense at times. It’s not pretty. Every now and then I like to mix it up and look into other aspects of our culture- books, films, the creative industries- even golf.

Readers may remember I kicked off 2026 with a Q&A with author and journalist Salil Tripathi on the art of writing and how to write well about technology. I wanted to start the year with something positive and inspirational, a break from the intense first few days of January, but also pick up some tips to improve my own writing. In my spare time (haha) I’m doing a Freelance Feature Writing course at the London School of Journalism, as this is a side of my business I would like to grow.

I asked Salil for books on the writing process he would recommend. He - and many other writers I have spoken to - recommended “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King. I picked up a second hand copy and read it in two days. One of my journalism course assignments was to write a book review, and I chose this. I rather like it so I thought I’d share it here.

Normal tech dramas will resume next week.

Book review: “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King

Stephen King cannot remember writing his 1981 bestseller Cujo. This gut-punch of a confession sets On Writing apart from most writing manuals out there, not least because King includes his struggles with alcohol and cocaine addiction.

Part memoir, part writing advice, the first of three acts is the “CV” - childhood memories most relevant on King’s path to becoming one of the world’s most successful writers. His early life is stuffed with 1960s Americana: the trailer park, movie theatres and soda pop - familiar backdrops of Stand By Me or It- as he narrates the journey from selling stories to relatives for a quarter, to selling his first novel, Carrie, for $400,000 in 1974.

Some enjoy reading stories but have no interest in how stories come to the page. The latter reader may therefore want to skip part two on “Writing”, as King rummages through his “toolbox” of vocabulary, grammar, story and theme. However, King’s grammar lesson is more conversational and entertaining than formal guides like “The Elements of Style” and perhaps more likely to stick.

The twist is the third and final part, “Living”, written while in recovery from a serious road accident. King comes to his desk in great pain to finish this book; he never became a writer for the money or the fame. He says he did it because he had to (although naming the van driver that hit him perhaps served as motivation in this instance.) Dear reader, warns King, “do not come lightly to the blank page.”

King’s horror tales might not be to everyone’s taste but unlike Annie Wilkes in Misery, there’s no need to be a number one fan to enjoy this book. His love for writing is deep in every page and yes, he wishes he could remember enjoying writing Cujo.

This week marked Safer Internet Day, with the theme “Smart tech, safe choices- exploring the safe and responsible use of AI.” Of course.

I participated in an event hosted by the marvellous ladies at Internet Exchange, which leaned more on the “smart tech, safe choices” part of the theme, where we discussed Encryption and Feminism- Reimagining Child Safety Without Surveillance.

This online session built on an IRL session I was part of at Mozilla Festival in Barcelona in November last year. That tiny room up two flights of stairs at the back of a building in the style of a Castellón town house was packed and not everyone who wanted to join could physically squeeze in, so the organisers from Internet Exchange decided to rerun the session online.

The panel and amazing audience explored feminist narratives that can counter calls to weaken encryption in the name of child safety. As set out at the start of the session, this is not about downplaying the need to protect children. It’s about reimagining what child safety can look like without surveillance, and starting to articulate feminist principles for strong encryption- the next stage of the work. More on that later.

What are the arguments for and against encryption (briefly)?

The encryption debate has long been a source of tension between child rights groups and digital rights groups- I remember being at a child rights conference about 10 years ago and actually getting boo’ed by the audience for mentioning encryption. I don’t think that would happen now but it is still a real puzzle. Encryption and child safety is the most difficult issue I’ve ever worked on.

When we talk about encryption, we are mostly talking about end to end encryption (E2EE.) Only the sender and recipient- not even the provider of the service- can access the contents of a message, providing secure communications that are essential for security and privacy in a digital world.

Only a few years ago it was more of an effort to encrypt communications. Some readers may remember using PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to encrypt emails, which involved configuring the email client and generating a pair of public and private “keys” to enhance email security.

Adoption of privacy preserving tools is now widespread and normal as awareness of surveillance and cybercrime is more prevalent. The UN recognised in 2015 that encryption is part of human rights protection, allowing those at risk to communicate securely and privately. E2EE is seamlessly integrated into many communications tools today: Signal messaging, Proton email and services, Whatsapp uses Signal protocol (although Whatsapp still collects metadata.)

Many governments are not happy with this situation, as encryption hampers law enforcement ability to see communications and intelligence agencies often refer to this as “going dark”. Child exploitation and abuse is a major concern and a consistent argument against encryption, because criminals use encrypted services too, including to disseminate child abuse material.

This is an issue that goes round in circles every few years with increasingly novel proposals on how to “break” encryption, which have significant consequences for all of us in terms of how we communicate. The most common proposal is demanding a “back door” into encrypted comms, only available to one government agency. This is unworkable as it introduces vulnerabilities that would inevitably be discovered and exploited by others, opening up a whole raft of wider consequences.

So the stalemate is that we cannot have privacy and security, we must choose one. This false binary drives technical innovation in this area.

The current popular innovation proposed to avoid “breaking” E2EE but still allow access to communications is “client side scanning”. This compels all content to be analysed on a device before it is uploaded to a platform, and if it “passes” then it can be encrypted.

This shift to total surveillance of all communications in the name of child safety is once again back into the privacy vs. security binary.

Abuse in the open

With the focus on developing technical innovations to solve a problem that at its core is not technical, have the root causes been neglected?

In just the past three months since we originally ran this session at Mozfest, and as I wrote about last week, we’ve witnessed the horror of the Grok AI chatbot being used by men to generate non-consensual sexual images on X (formerly Twitter) by asking it to place real women and children in bikinis and sexualised situations. As journalists are making their way through millions of documents in the Epstein files, we learn more of the extent of crimes against children perpetrated by a wide network of high profile men.

These crimes took place completely in the open and have not been handled well. There is no encryption to blame; a major social media platform published CSAM (child sexual abuse material) generated by users. Epstein was seemingly using an unencrypted Yahoo email.

This demonstrates to me that child safety needs completely reimagining. As I wrote last week, there were so many points in the development of Grok where it could have taken a different turn. We need to look beyond the technology itself at the design, processes and environment in which it is developed, and centre the people it is at risk of harming.

We unfortunately exist in a digital ecosystem that is largely stacked against us, one that itself exists in a reality where women and girls come last.

The more groups putting their heads together on this to come up with solutions the better and I’m so pleased that Internet Exchange are keeping the conversation going to develop a feminist approach to encryption, which I can see complimenting all the great work around feminist approaches to innovation, and even feminist foreign policy.

This is a really difficult issue and it’s important to keep talking about it, to keep imagining how things could be different.

Let’s try it, even if it makes the internet safer for just one day.

What next?

Internet Exchange want to run a series of small, interactive follow-up workshops focused on crafting narratives grounded in feminist approaches to encryption across policy, organisational change, product and design. Register your interest below and hopefully see you there!

Register Interest

The horror of the Grok AI chatbot being used by men to generate non-consensual sexual images on X (formerly Twitter) - by asking it to place real women and children in bikinis and sexualised situations- is a clear warning that the “innovation” of integrating generative AI into social media platforms can cause great harm.

Governments and regulators are starting to bite but not only is it more difficult for victims to seek justice after the fact, reactive regulatory investigation and action is complex. The lesson must be what proactive protections can we embed in AI legislation and product design that forces safety assessments before products and services are released into society?

Many working in the field of digital rights view the Grok situation as entirely predictable and a foreseeable situation they had warned of since generative AI turbocharged everything in 2023. Grok is the culmination of years of trust and safety layoffs within tech companies and cutting safety corners in AI development. It is decades of technological developments devaluing and exploiting women’s images and data that allowed unchecked escalation of the creation of deepfakes targeting women.

We must do better for the women and children who have been targeted. If you have been affected, the Revenge Porn helpline can provide support in the UK. You are not to blame.

Grok did not appear out of nowhere. This week I want to look at Grok’s timeline for initial thoughts on where early intervention could have happened. There are many barriers to women seeking justice and the reality is we rely on regulators to be vigilant.

Red flags, everywhere.

As the old stat goes, 98% of deepfakes are pornographic, and 99% of those are of women. Concerns go back to around 2018 when women celebrities were the first to be targeted with deepfake pornography. The first iterations of deepfake software needed a lot of images to create a decent deepfake, and there are a lot of images of, say, Kim Kardashian. The results were mainly housed on porn sites, or far corners of the internet.

Now, you only need one image to achieve the same result. A profile photo perhaps.

This breakthrough heralded the rise of “nudification apps”, which use AI to “undress” women on the basis of just one photo. These apps are available through a general online search, further nudging abuse into the digital mainstream.

Why Grok is so shocking is the non-consensual pornographic deepfakes of women and children did not appear on the dark web, or even within a specialised app. It happened on a mainstream social media platform, with a low barrier to entry, and a sign up age of 13+. Let that sink in.

Life of Grok.

Grok AI started out as a chatbot developed by xAI, one of Elon Musk’s companies. Released in November 2023 as generative AI burst onto the scene, it was originally only available to paid premium subscribers of X (formerly Twitter) to access, then for $16 per month. Grok was different to competitors like ChatGPT, said xAI, because the chatbot had few guardrails. It could be “rebellious” and answer “spicy questions” that other Large Language Models (LLMs) might avoid. It reportedly took two months to develop.

The following year was considered a bumper election year as half the world’s population went to the polls in 2024. There were significant fears from civil society that AI image generators could be used to spread disinformation and disrupt democratic processes by producing highly realistic deepfakes about political candidates and the political process.

By now Grok included an image generator and was available for all X users, albeit with a limited amount of prompts. Some image generators like Midjourney restricted images of U.S politicians from being generated, but did not roll it out globally. Grok had no such guardrails, leading to a barrage of images of Trump, Kamala Harris and Biden, undermining larger industry efforts to curb disinformation.

More broadly, AI image generators were causing problems for women in politics. The UK voted its highest proportion of women to Parliament in July 2024 (40%) and many were victims of deepfake pornography, including the then Deputy Prime Minister. The spread of pornographic deepfakes resulted in harassment and physical attacks on women candidates and politicians in many countries, documented in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Chile and Venezuela.

By summer 2025, Grok had a Nazi problem and often responded to user prompts with anti-semitic rants. Civil society urged lawmakers in the U.S to investigate the spread of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) on the platform. Lawmakers urged Musk to rein in the spread of disinformation. All X users could now enjoy unlimited use of Grok and it was integrated into Tesla vehicles.

By December 2025, the heralded future of social media integration with AI was represented by a flood of AI generated, non-consensual pornographic deepfakes of women and children.

The Centre For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organisation sued by Musk and its CEO subject to a US visa ban, reported that Grok had created 3 million sexualised images over 11 days, including 23,000 of children. AI Forensics monitored X’s various patches for the problem in January and found them to be inconsistent.

Women who tried to protest were flooded with more extreme altered images of themselves. The mother of one of Musk’s children was a victim, telling The Guardian she felt “horrified and violated” by the altered image of her, in which her child’s backpack could be seen in the background.

Cranking up regulatory powers.

There has rightly been a flurry of legal and policy action - largely at the investigations stage- including in the UK and the European Commission (the Commission has already fined X for breaching transparency obligations of the Digital Services Act.)

The UK floated a ban of the whole X platform, but that would likely be considered disproportionate. The problem doesn’t stop at X; this is where images were public, but Grok also has a stand alone app where the abusive images would remain private and more investigation would be needed to obtain evidence.

Ofcom has announced they will investigate Grok, but do not have the mandate to investigate xAI, the company that developed Grok, because the scope of the Online Safety Act is just on chatbots. The Information Commissioner’s Office (the ICO, the UK’s data protection regulator) can investigate xAI and have opened an investigation into xAI.

Regulation cranks up, but were there opportunities to intervene at several points as the warnings rolled in? The lack of guardrails and failure to address the spread of disinformation as more powerful models were released; the lack of scrutiny on Grok being fully integrated into X; the ability for unlimited prompts. The investigations will hopefully investigate these moments and strengthen pre-emptive action for the future. Some governments are taking a more direct approach; the Paris offices of X were raided in Paris by the French cybercrime unit.

Creating sexually explicit deepfakes will soon be a criminal offence in the UK. Creating child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) is always a crime, everywhere. Grok is of course a tool, developed recklessly, but tools are used by people. The most cutting edge tool enabled the old-as-time chestnut of telling a woman to shut up. This latest effort to silence and humiliate women into withdrawing from public and online spaces is yet another example of gender-based violence we need to tackle.

Worth £124 billion a year to the economy and responsible for 7% of all jobs in the UK, protecting the UK’s creative industries- one of our greatest exports- is a vital conversation.

The starting point is protecting arts education in schools, woefully rolled back over the years. As someone who started out in the film industry, I know first hand the benefits of a creative education and how it leads to all sorts of innovation and creative thinking. And boy, do we need creative thinking right now to get us out of the messes we are in.

These are issues I’ve discussed at length with my pal Abi Meats- a designer and joint owner of Rude, the company she has run for almost 30 years with husband Rupert. Rude started as a clothing label and evolved into illustration, printmaking, animation, and textile design. There is no part of the creative industries Abi hasn’t joyfully bounded across, as well as being the proprietor of one of the best coffee spots in London, Everyday Sunshine, a bright and welcoming corner of Hackney.

Abi is also a teacher and huge champion of the creative arts. She is currently campaigning to reverse the decline of art education in the UK through her project Create!, a book inspiring young people to explore the world of creative careers currently making its way into every primary school in the country. She’s taking the fight to Parliament to hold the government good to their commitment to invest in arts education and is outspoken about the impact of AI on her sector. She is an all round amazing human being with A LOT to say.

I got her to sit still for 5 minutes so I could ask her a few questions.

You’ve produced this amazing book, Create! How To Unleash Your Creative Superpowers. It’s aimed at children and showcases lots of different jobs and careers in the creative industries. What is your ambition for the project? Why now?

When my kids started school, I noticed the art coming home had stopped. I went in to ask how much art they were doing and was shocked - it was only once a month. [Editor’s note: For context, Abi once described this moment as marching into the head teacher’s office like Joan of Arc with a flat white.] The head teacher suggested I run the after-school art club, which I did. Each week, I set a brief for a different creative discipline: architecture one week, fashion the next. Watching kids have lightbulb moments as they discovered they were natural engineers, planners, or designers was incredible.

I decided to turn this experience into a book. I got close to publishing it, but just before COVID it was dropped. I put it back on Dropbox and forgot about it until Rishi Sunak announced that every child would have to do maths until 18. That triggered a full-body reaction and I decided to fund it myself. I crowdfunded £15,000 and got a sponsorship from [homeware brand] Joseph Joseph. With that, I paid a graduate illustrator, a designer, and an out-of-work writer to create the book. We interviewed over 50 creative mentors about their careers, roles, and day-to-day work. The book is easy-to-read, fun, and designed for kids. The first run fulfilled the crowdfunding orders, and eventually it was published internationally by Hachette Children’s, imprint Laurence King, last September. Now, the ambition is to get it into every school in the UK and make it a part of creative learning practice.

In a recent article for The Independent, you wrote, “Over the past decade, arts education has suffered badly amid an obsession with STEM subjects, driven by the false idea that creativity and technical skills exist in competition…creativity is not the opposite of science or technology, it is the engine that powers them.” Can you expand?

The arts have not only been eroded over time, they’ve been destroyed in the public psyche. When I do assemblies for kids about to choose their GCSEs, even at 12 or 13, it’s often too late. They’ve already been pushed toward STEM and ask: “Is this a side hustle? You can’t do this as a proper job. My mum says I have to be a doctor.” Many still think of the arts only as fine art. Kids don’t realise that everything around them is made, and creatives are behind it: the film they watch, the shoes they wear, the hairstyle they have. We need to become a nation of makers, crafters, and thinkers again.

We also need to rethink how schools teach. Art has almost no place right now, which creates a generation learning without interaction, experimentation, or curiosity. Kids need to touch materials, test ideas, understand processes, and consider the lifecycle of the things they use—like knowing a polyester top from H&M won’t break down naturally. My curiosity came from growing up in the 1980s in a state school with woodwork, metalwork, home economics, and art. Processing what I learned from my head to my hands made learning stick.

There’s a bigger disconnect, too: the UK earns a lot from creative industries, but grassroots support is minimal. I’d like education and industry to be more integrated, with government-supported work placements and apprenticeships. Studios could host students on paid modular placements, rather than relying on unpaid internships that reinforce elitism.

While you were getting Create! off the ground, generative AI burst onto the scene. How has it impacted your work, your company and the book project? How about others in your network- the illustrators, filmmakers etc?

Recently, I was at a friend’s birthday with peers I went to university with - people who’ve spent their entire adult lives working in the creative industries. I was genuinely shocked by what I heard. Two have retrained as secondary school art teachers (which is no bad thing in itself), two others are now working at Whole Foods, and another is barely scraping together freelance work, under huge financial and emotional strain that’s spilling into home life.

What it really highlighted is that many creative professionals in their 50s have effectively become dispensable well before retirement age. These are skilled, experienced people - not early-career workers failing to “keep up”, but individuals whose expertise has quietly stopped being valued in the market. No one is being consulted on this shift. There’s been no managed transition, no protection, no meaningful dialogue with the people most affected.

Among illustrators in particular, there was a moment of real panic when Labour took office and proposals emerged around AI and copyright.

What’s often forgotten is that artists’ rights in the UK were hard-won. Back in the 1980s, photographers and illustrators were protected through the work of people like John Kennedy — a photographer and artists’ rights campaigner who was one of the driving forces behind securing legal recognition and payment for creators. He was a founding figure of the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) in 1984. That kind of collective protection mattered. Today, many creatives feel that without a strong, visible trade body advocating for them in the AI era, they are left to fend for themselves.

For many, the direction of travel feels threatening. An opt-out system, rather than permission-based licensing, is seen as effectively handing power to large tech companies while placing the burden on individual creators who lack the resources to protect themselves.

Most illustrators I know are broke, hustling for scraps of work, and generally having a fucking miserable time of it.

We’re not asking for handouts. We’re asking for recognition, consultation, and systems that acknowledge the value we generate. Personally, I’m getting tired and a bit long in the tooth with having to fight every step of the way just to stay afloat. And I know I’m not alone in that. If this level of strain continues unchecked, the resilience policymakers have long taken for granted may eventually run out.

But there’s a reason this article is not titled “Why I support a blanket social media ban for under 16s” because like most things, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Political momentum is behind a ban. The Online Safety Act in the UK places obligations on platforms to protect users, particularly children, from harmful content, but the completely foreseeable situation with X’s AI tool Grok being used by men to undress photos of women and children perhaps drove many in government to lose patience.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was happily making its way though the House of Lords this week, when a proposed amendment was voted in requiring the government to introduce regulation to prevent under 16s from accessing social media.

So the Bill goes back to the House of Commons and a ban is on the cards. 60 Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Keir Starmer to support the ban. Starmer, in an effort to slow things down, announced a consultation to gather evidence and report in the summer.

Child safety groups are largely against a blanket ban. Technically implementing a ban gives rise to a problematic age verification industry extracting data from children (an article for another time.) Of course teenagers will try and evade the ban- they are teenagers. Downloads of VPNs, tools that disguise your location and can mask the country you are in, surged when the Online Safety Act came into force last July as age verification kicked in. A less reported amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is one where regulations should be introduced to prevent children accessing VPNs.

Everyone is scrutinising Australia closely, where a social media ban was enacted in December, to see how it works out.

What would a ban achieve?

I completely understand the desire for a ban. As I wrote recently, platforms struggle to get safety right. They have failed to enforce their own age limits (currently 13+), failed to consistently remove harmful content for children such as suicide/self harm, failed to address the “sextortion” phenomenon, or stamp out online grooming. Trust and safety is expensive and many platforms have rolled back investment. Even services dedicated to children struggle to get it right- looking at you Roblox.

Longer term impacts link social media use to increased depression and anxiety- these studies come from Meta themselves , leaked by whistleblowers.

All this adds up to social media platforms not being safe for children, because they are not made for them.

A ban would support parents overwhelmed with navigating online safety resources, provide something concrete to help parents set boundaries and feel they are not the only ones setting these rules. It takes a village, as the saying goes.

On the other hand, a ban would let companies off the hook. There is broad awareness that social media platforms make money (a lot of it) by keeping you on the platform to show you adverts and it is this business model that has given rise to the problematic features and algorithms designed to achieve this goal.

The UK’s social media consultation will look at the features of social media that drive addictive or compulsive use such as “infinite scrolling”. Looking under the hood like this is key. We need to get to grips with how features are designed and why, because another bit of tech will be along in a minute that will present similar issues.

So the options here are a ban or making social media safer, but is this actually possible?

Is it possible to make social media safer?

Remember when the EU brought in regulation on political advertising last year, Google and Meta withdrew political advertising from the region? This indicates it was easier to cut off that part of the business than comply with regulation demanding more transparency and accountability.

Is it possible to make social media safer without starting from scratch with a different business model? Is that what we should ultimately be encouraging? Social media is not the internet, there are infinite possibilities for connection, innovation and positive experiences. We don’t need to be trapped in this small corner of the web.

What are we trying to ban?

Are we really talking about social media in general or are we talking about the platforms with staggering levels of harm and non compliance with existing laws? Are we really talking about X here? Australia’s ban includes YouTube but not YouTube Kids, seemingly sidestepping the issue of screentime and recommender systems. Messaging apps like WhatsApp are not included.

As companies scramble to incorporate AI in their platforms in the most reckless way (Grok, again) the EU and UK began to explore options of blocking whole platforms. This is a slippery slope of course and would not pass the test as outlined in human rights law with regards to restricting freedom of expression (that everyone seems to have forgotten existed) of whether a measure is legal, necessary and proportionate.

Film style classifications that apply risk based age ratings to platforms could target the worst platforms, support parents to enact boundaries and keep the connection benefits. The question remains whether this would amount to a technically implemented ban or guidance.

What do young people think?

Great question. Young people’s voices are often left out of this debate and we need them to feature prominently. When asked, young people want online spaces for them and are often doing their best to navigate an online world not designed for them.

“Young people” are not all the same and using social media for connection, exploration and information is not a positive impact across the board. Esther Grey, the mother of Brihanna Grey who was murdered in 2023, supports a ban, writing to Keir Starmer to describe how her daughter’s self harm and eating disorder was exacerbated by an obsession with TikTok influencers.

Where next?

Ultimately, banning social media lets platforms off the hook and won’t change their design or business model, the core elements which impact people of all ages, not just children. Building solutions that start with the needs of the most vulnerable creates effective solutions for everyone. This approach also avoids a “cliff edge” of children coming to platforms at 16 where nothing has changed and all the harms still exist.

The government needs to enact measures that force companies to change. Certain features considered addictive could be banned, age classifications in place to support parents set boundaries, with perhaps a targeted, temporary ban on certain platforms in their back pocket as the incentive. The question still remains if it is actually possible to make platforms safer, and if companies have both the will and the way.

I wanted the first newsletter from The Prompt in 2026 to be gentle, positive and inspirational; a break from the intense global events of the first days of January. Settle in and absorb these thoughts about the art of writing and compelling storytelling about technology’s impacts on our human rights.

One of the reasons I started this Substack was to improve my writing, be more disciplined and grow the confidence to build a writing career. A writer who has inspired and encouraged me over the years is my great friend Salil Tripathi.

Salil graciously agreed to a Q&A with me for this week’s newsletter; below he shares wisdom on writing, human rights, technology, reading recommendations and the future of journalism.

Salil was born in Bombay and lives in New York. He is an award-winning journalist and writer who was a correspondent in Southeast Asia based in Singapore and Hong Kong and has been a human rights researcher in Africa and Latin America. He is senior adviser on global issues at the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB), and has been a researcher at Amnesty International and policy adviser at International Alert. He is also senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

Salil and I worked together at IHRB for several years when I first started in the field. He had the unenviable job of editing my blogs and reports and encouraged me to read, write and improve. He is a fierce advocate of freedom of expression and on our many travels together he introduced me to wonderful writers and human rights defenders in Myanmar, Kenya and Egypt.

He has authored several books. His latest book, The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, was long-listed for the Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya NIF prize for non-fiction and is short-listed for the History Literature Prize. His previous works include Offence: The Hindu Case (my personal favourite and mandatory reading for all students of free expression), Detours: Songs of the Open Road, and The Colonel Who Would Not Repent (which was long-listed for the Tata Literature Festival prize). Salil is the co-editor of For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, a collection of writings from and about prison, with artist Shilpa Gupta. He is on the board of PEN International and chairs the Jury of the Disturbing the Peace Prize given by the Vaclav Havel Center in New York.

Here is our conversation. Take a moment to put aside all the noise and enjoy Salil’s beautiful words.

You’re a journalist and author combined with a long career as a human rights advocate, particularly defending freedom of expression. When did you know you wanted to follow a career in writing? How did you get your start and who inspired you?

One of the earliest sounds I recall is the clatter of the mechanical typewriter, as my father, who was a management consultant, would type articles which were published in magazines in India. My mother too wrote articles for Gujarati and English newspapers and magazines on social issues – she wrote by long-hand, and then my father would type those. Typing and writing seemed to me romantic. At my high school I edited a literary wall-paper, and at college, I ran a student-run newspaper published each month. And then, while at college, I pitched articles to magazines in India, and editors were mildly amused that someone barely out of teens wanted to write. Some of them indulged me, and I began writing, and I felt there was not going to be any retreat after that.

My mother had a strong sense of ethics and was deeply influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, India’s founding father; and that was another deep influence, including going regularly to the Gandhi museum near our home in Bombay.

The Indian Emergency of 1975-1977, when the government arrested many opposition leaders and undermined democracy strengthened my views on freedom of expression and human rights, and in my early years in journalism, from 1982 onwards, I often wrote about bans on plays, or about unlawful evictions, or attacks on minorities. So the interests coincided.

Among those who inspired me in my early years were investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; the filmed depiction of a reporter covering a failed coup in Indonesia, in The Year of Living Dangerously; and fearless editors who defied the Indian Emergency, people like A.D. Gorwala and Nikhil Chakrabarty, as well as S Nihal Singh. I was lucky enough to work with Nihal Singh for a short period in 1986-87.

One of the reasons I started a Substack was to become a more disciplined writer. What advice can you give on creating space to write and maintaining the discipline to write consistently?

There is no one best way to do it, and many writers have their personal quirks. But having a disciplined routine helps—writing early morning is great for creative writing, as you are still emerging from your dreams.

For columns, I have found that structuring one in my mind – where to begin, where to continue, and how to end – before going to bed helps; the clutter disappears the next morning when you write. There are also tedious things one has to write, and those in fact are harder. There are writers who believe they must write a certain amount per day. I haven’t followed that. For example, there are times when weeks and months go by and I haven’t written anything meaningful. And yet, sitting in front of the laptop in the morning and typing ideas, as they come to your mind, is good discipline; the crucial part is finding the thread that connects the points on the page. Before I started writing on a computer, I used to jot down all ideas on a large sheet, draw a circle around them; bunch them by drawing lines to connect them; and then rank order them – and then start writing. Much of that is now part of the muscle memory, but for any grand project, visualization does help. Scrivener is a good software program to do such things.

You once recommended I should own “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White which is a great reference and a constant presence on my desk. I also revisit George Orwell essays for writing inspiration, and Elif Shafak’s Substack “Unmapped Storylands” is a new favourite of mine for her essays about the writing process. Which other books are good on the writing process and which writers do you revisit for inspiration?

I found Stephen King’s book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft to be very useful. I have also liked John McPhee’s Draft No 4: On the Writing Process, Robert Caro’s Working, Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language, on editing, there’s Stet: An Editor’s Life, by Diana Athill, and if poetry is your thing, Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook was great. Mario Vargas Llosa too had a good book, Letters to a Young Novelist.

You have been involved with PEN International for many years and have been in the orbit of many remarkable writers who continue to create under immense pressure and threats to their livelihoods and safety. How important is literary freedom, and why are writers still persecuted around the world?

Literary freedom is exceptionally important. That we think, ideate, express those ideas and give shape to our imagination through words, creating art, is a great gift. And stories and myths have sustained humanity for centuries. We want to know what-happens-next, and authors tell us that. Their books are the ultimate virtual reality, for which we need only our mind and the writer’s imagination, and no technological gizmos to intermediate. Suppressing those ideas is terrible. It takes us towards conformity and great writers defy that. And it is because they challenge conformity, those with power seek to suppress them. That’s why they get persecuted. And yet they persist.

We both write regularly about technology and human rights. It can be hard to explain technical concepts and connect abstract concepts like “data” and “algorithms” to people’s lives. How do you bring technical concepts to life in your writing?

That’s a great question. The basic assumption I make is that the reader is intelligent and curious but does not have all the information. And our role is to make it accessible. Using simpler words instead of complex jargon, examples instead of theoretical constructs, anecdotes instead of abstractions, and comparison of the unknown with what is known – these are some of the simple ways to make complex ideas simpler. Algorithm is a good example. Algorithm is like a recipe. A how-to kit. It gives instructions to teach the machine how to do something. If you follow the right steps, you’ll get the same outcome. It is a carefully planned, ordered instruction-set that solves a problem or gets something done. I know that’s many, many words, but shorten it to a few words or a clause, and it can be understood.

News has been devalued in recent years by social media taking the lion’s share of advertising revenues, as well as attacks by populist politicians on news outlets and the public’s loss of trust in mainstream media. Can we reverse this trend? What do you see for the future of journalism?

The future of journalism is bleak in the short term. Advertising is deserting traditional media, like newspapers and magazines, even TV networks, and going to web-based properties. The news there tends to be partisan, and it is difficult to tell who has more credibility, since artificial intelligence enables creation of programmes that seem real, but may not be accurate. However, I’d like to believe that people have hunger for information that tells them what really happened; they do want to get an overall picture, and not only what is said in their own bubble (it is because we remain in bubbles that we are surprised when something unexpected happens). And that calls for old-style, dispassionate, comprehensive journalism, and I believe the audiences will demand such products, and publications or media properties that cater to such needs will gain credibility. These could be non-profit entity, cooperatives formed by journalists, ad hoc partnerships, media entities supported by wealthy benefactors, and so on. In early days of journalism, there were many pamphlets and ‘scandal sheets,’ that claimed to tell you what happened. And people were frustrated because those publications were biased, and therefore demand arose for unbiased reporting, and traditional centrist newspapers and broadcast organisations came into being. On the Internet, we are seeing a proliferation of the pamphlets – Warhol said everyone is famous for 15 minutes; we are in that age where everyone appears to be a journalist, as they sit on a newsdesk, have images blinking behind, and speak in an excited tone about what’s happened. But real reporting requires being on the field, on the ground, and witnessing history. As a species, we want those stories. That hunger remains. And there will be entities that will meet that demand. This might seem an unusually rosy view – but it is not. I’m not saying old-style newspapers will be back. But old-style story-telling will be back.

It would be wonderful to hear from a few more of you about the kind of content you would like to receive from The Prompt in 2026. The survey takes 2-3 minutes and I’m grateful for all feedback.

You can access the survey here and it is fully anonymous.

Thanks again and take care,

Lucy

As I mentioned last week, The Prompt is taking a break from publishing weekly articles in December to focus on developing new content for 2026.

This week I am sending out a very short survey as I would love your views to help shape The Prompt for the future if you have two minutes.

You can access the survey here and it is fully anonymous.

Thank you so much for subscribing, for your messages and your support this year. It really means a lot.

I’ll be giving your inboxes a break until January. Until then, take care and I’ll see you in 2026!

Lots of love,

Lucy

The victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election on November 4th ignited sparks of hope that spread across the whole of the U.S and beyond in dark times.

Born in Uganda and raised in New York City, 34 year old Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a Muslim. It begs the question: how on earth did he pull off such a victory in Trump’s America? How can others across the world build such a positive movement at a time of such despair?

Largely unknown outside of New York when he secured the Democratic nomination back in June, Mamdani ran on a platform of affordability. The cost of living in New York is spiralling and tackling the year on year rent increases pushing people to the brink was the defining campaign issue.

Mamdani, a longtime grassroots organiser, turned up at “Freeze The Rent” protests to announce his signature policy of freezing New York rents for four years. He would also make buses free and provide universal childcare.

To pay for it, he’s going to tax the rich. Imposing a 2% tax increase on those earning over a million dollars a year, taking their tax rate from 3.9%- 5.9%, would raise $4 billion to fund these initiatives. There are a lot of billionaires in New York, including President Trump, and a lot of wealthy people working in real estate who of course hate this plan.

To most, taxing the very wealthy is socialism; to the very wealthy it’s communism.

The wealthiest New Yorkers poured money into the campaign of Mamdani’s opponent Andrew Cuomo who ran a vindictive campaign rooted in fear, tearing down Mamdani’s socialism and his faith in the most unpleasant way.

Mamdani took it all on and put forward alternatives that people want. Hugely charismatic, he is big on TikTok and ran a slick social media campaign reminiscent of 2008 Obama alongside incredible branding of jolly campaign posters and hand-held fans in joyous colours.

He walked the streets, he interviewed people about why they voted for Trump, he took selfies. He organised a scavenger hunt in his own neighbourhood of Queens, where hundreds of people searched for clues and riddles.

Community organising was absolutely key to his success. The campaign attracted over 100,000 volunteers who knocked on 3.1 million doors in a highly organised “get out the vote” campaign.

And now, to work…

This week Mamdani announced 17 Transition Advisory Committees made up of 400 experts. Committees include community organising, community safety, crime, economics, emergency response, health, housing and - very exciting- technology.

Advisory Committees are overseen by the all-women Transition Team’s four co-chair’s, one of whom is Linda Khan, the fearless former Chair of the Federal Trade Commission who took on Big Tech in some landmark cases.

The Advisory Committee remit is to provide policy and hiring recommendations to the Transition Team in advance of Mumdani’s swearing in as Mayor on January 1st 2026. Mamdani is accepting speculative applications from the public for roles in his team- the online “resume portal” received 50,000 applications in a week.

The Advisory Committee on Technology is the stand out one for me of course, and anyone working on digital rights will recognise some fabulous names on the team which makes the whole initiative so incredibly promising and exciting.

What will be Mumdani’s tech agenda? Given his grassroots community organising background, he’s probably going to ask people what it should be. It could be a real game changer and a roadmap for other cities around the world. I’m hoping to see city-wide consultation and the development of Citizen Assemblies. There will probably be a role of chief technology officer for the city, like Barcelona. Perhaps health facilities could be encouraged to run their own data platforms instead of giving in to Palantir, like Greater Manchester in the U.K.

What will Mumdani do about ICE agents in NYC using facial recognition apps indiscriminately? Will his affordability platform extend to digital infrastructure, like universal free Wi-Fi?

Indeed, the addition of Ruha Benjamin on the team (who regular readers will know I’m a huge fan of) might give some clues as to the direction. In her latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, Benjamin highlights the work of Francesca Bria, former chief technology officer for the city of Barcelona, who put democratic control of technology at the centre, rather than shoe-horning technical solutions into people’s lives at the behest of Big Tech. Benjamin quotes Bria explaining that this approach, “entails turning data into a common good and public infrastructure…It does not start with connectivity, data, sensors, AI, algorithms. No, it starts with people.”

People are already putting together a blueprint of Mamdani’s campaign to replicate in cities across the world in order to usher in more progressive leaders. NYC’s technology strategy, building on the success of others, could provide a roadmap of how democratic control of technology works in practice. I cannot wait to see how this develops and I wish the team all the best. No pressure.

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No viewers complained at the time, but the clumsy edit was picked up internally in a memo on editorial bias written by an adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee and it is this memo that was leaked and published by The Daily Telegraph in the U.K on November 6th.

As a result, the BBC Director-General Tim Davie and Head of News Deborah Turness resigned. The BBC apologised for the edit but has so far refused to pay compensation demanded by Trump, hence the potential lawsuit.

This is not an analysis of the legal arguments both sides may or may not have, this is about the place of the BBC- the Beeb, Aunty- in the world and while it can be messy, there is more at stake than $1 billion.

Trump does not hide his disdain for the media- just two days ago he yelled “quiet, piggy!” in the face of a female reporter aboard Air Force One. He has successfully sued ABC News and Paramount/CBS in the U.S for millions of dollars for some perceived slight; there are cases pending against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and a case against CNN has been dismissed. Public media in the U.S is being defunded state by state, the subject of an excellent analysis by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight , and now Trump is gunning for public media on this side of the pond.

The BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, is a public-service broadcaster in the U.K with a mission to inform, educate and entertain.

Does the BBC have problems? Oh yes. In the quest for impartiality there have been missteps in giving equal weight and air time to fact and conspiracy, see climate change coverage, and letting views be aired unchallenged. But the BBC cannot win- it is in the middle of every culture war, accused of both left and right wing bias simultaneously and many enemies ready to tear it down over the slightest error.

And yet, the BBC is consistently polled as the most trusted news provider internationally, including in the U.S. This is partly due to the incredible BBC World Service, of great importance in countries where the BBC is the only alternative to State-run media. Quite the feat when media freedom is in decline all over the world and struggling under the weight of combatting disinformation.

One reason the BBC provokes such a reaction in the U.K is because we all have a stake in it. It is a public broadcaster part-funded by the government through a Royal Charter that sets out governance and regulatory arrangements and renewed every 10 years. U.K households are required to have a TV license, currently costing £174.50 per year, which funds BBC TV, radio and online content.

The BBC is the original pay for content business model and the OG streamer with the launch of IPlayer in 2007. For comparison Netflix costs £155.88 per year and they don’t have news, radio or Celebrity Traitors.

The BBC does not rely on advertising for funding, in fact any kind of commercial promotion is strictly forbidden. You won’t find huge cash prizes or high value swag on the quiz shows. Case in point: On the U.S version of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, prizes are typically thousands of dollars worth of make-up and $100,000 cash. On the BBC version the prize is a badge.

Although being publicly funded comes with challenges, not having to chase advertising revenues has somewhat shielded it from the general decline of the media landscape.

The increasing trend of accessing news on social media has had a devestating impact on the media landscape, as both audiences and lucrative advertising revenues are drawn away from independent media websites which often subsidise print media. This has led to a sustainability struggle of legacy media with many local news outlets ceasing to exist and the media sector being profoundly weakened. Media outlets with an online presence on social media platforms are at the mercy of search rankings or social media algorithms for publicising their articles, platforms which do not prioritise content of public interest.

It is also not new for the BBC to be attacked. Successive governments have hung the threat of Royal Charter renewal over the BBC for decades and I recently wrote about Thatcher’s disdain for the Beeb in the 1980s. One criticism of our Prime Minister is that he has not come out to defend the BBC at this time; the fact that he has not attacked it is even more notable.

We are witnessing yet another Trump attack on yet another institution, but this time it’s one of ours. It will always drive someone crackers if two men do a viennese waltz on Strictly Come Dancing, or when Nigel Farage is on the news for drinking a pint again, but we’ll take care of the scrutiny and accountability ourselves thanks very much.

I support the BBC because it produces news I trust with a strong local presence and entertainment I can watch with my whole family. My child has free reign of IPlayer, the BBC’s streaming service, because the kids programming is excellent quality and does not treat children like a product. The incentives are different- it is not driven by an algorithm or advertising and I think it’s a bargain.

The BBC cannot settle with Trump. It is time to defend what we value and yes, fight like hell.

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Last week I was in Barcelona for the Mozilla Festival, or MozFest, organised by Mozilla Foundation, the makers of the Firefox web browser. It is a meetup of over two thousand digital rights activists, hackers, investors and youth leaders coming together to discuss digital rights, plot how to reclaim the internet from Big Tech and imagine how the internet could be a better place for everyone. Over three days there were 200+ debates, talks, showcases and art installations covering tech governance, design, security and the future. Full disclosure: Mozilla funded my travel/accommodation as an alumni fellow.

I went to my first MozFest some years ago in London with my tiny baby strapped to me and feeling a bit crazy. It was worth it though; I watched in amazement as someone who used to work for YouTube admitted the recommender algorithm was a black box. That’s the thing about MozFest- there will be at least one stand out moment that helps shape your ideas and work.

MozFest is now in its 15th year and is back in Barcelona where it began. It was held in Poble Espanyol, an open-air architectural museum showcasing different architectural aspects of Spain in real life scale. To get to the next event on the schedule, a Mozfest attendee might wander through a cobbled medieval plaza before navigating narrow passageways of whitewashed buildings and pops of azure blue reminiscent of villages perched on cliffs in Southern Spain. Despite this deeply traditional setting, Barcelona is one of the world’s first “smart cities”, with its own digital strategy and chief technology officer for the council.

The theme of the event was “Unlearning” - rethinking power, questioning who benefits from technology and imagining what alternatives could look like.

The keynote speaker to open MozFest on the main stage was academic/author/activist Ruha Benjamin, accompanied by the hardest working sign language interpreters in the business. An incredible choice to open proceedings, Ruha Benjamin lives unlearning. As she was speaking I ordered her latest book Imagination: A Manifesto to greet me when I returned home.

She weaved her thesis and theme brilliantly into countering the tech landscape we live with. We are trapped inside someone else’s imagination. She questioned mythologies of deep learning when,

“Many of those designing technology for society possess the shallowest understanding of the societies for which they build.”

Move fast and break things? Not all speed is movement (quoting Toni Cade Bambara).

What can be achieved, then, through imagination, through unlearning?

None of this glosses over the fact it has been an extremely difficult year. Who has left the movement due to continued pressure and threats? What learning did we miss out on due to funding cuts and killed projects? Some couldn’t even get visas to attend MozFest.

Mozilla Foundation itself has gone through many changes this past year with a new Executive Director presiding over staff layoffs and initiating new branding and image. By the show of hands in the plenary many were attending MozFest for the first time, which may have been a relief for the leadership as they steer in a new era for the organisation.

Away from the main stage, hidden in crammed rooms, the scrappy work of plotting, disagreeing, sharing and supporting was well underway.

A data centre being built in your town? Let’s come up with a plan.

Oh, you should definitely speak to so-and-so, I’ll grab them.

Youth groups envisaged their online utopia inspired by the election campaign of recently elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani: an internet future free of manipulation that maximises participation and community. The design decisions we make now decide whether that might become a reality.

We desperately need to unlearn and reimagine new business models for the internet and Mozilla are certainly having a go at that. I was expecting to hear more detail about Mozilla’s plans for expanding the advertising arm of the business and how this will be done in line with Mozilla’s values and manifesto. If I missed a session and someone has notes, feel free to share!

A big announcement was the investment in the Mozilla Data Collective. Building on Mozilla’s commitment to open source and following the success of Common Voice, a publicly available dataset of voices in hundreds of languages, Mozilla Data Collective is a platform hosting a range of datasets to allow people to experiment in developing and training AI products. These datasets could be available for free or a fee, with Mozilla taking a cut, potentially opening up new income streams and ownership models in the area of who gets to develop AI.

Meanwhile, in a tiny room up two flights of stairs at the back of a building in the style of a Castellón town house, I was part of the discussion “Encryption and Feminism: Reimagining Child Safety Without Surveillance” hosted by Internet Exchange. The ultimate unlearning and test of imagination, this contentious issue continues to challenge everyone working in digital rights. Built around the brilliant work of Chayn and Internet Exchange , our plan was to kick off the co-creation of pro-encryption principles rooted in feminist perspectives around power structures and challenging narratives. This is not easy. We have come a long way in bridging divides, advancing mainstream understanding that encryption protects the most vulnerable and the movement has kept the worst proposals to break encryption at bay, but there is much work to do to unlearn the narrative that pits child rights and digital rights against each other and incorporate the lived experience of survivors.

Mozilla is pretty good at bringing people together. I hadn’t seen some friends since pre-covid and some I had never met IRL. From the main stage on the last day Chelsea Manning encouraged a mass introduction of the crowd to each other. The noise and chatter went on for way longer than I think she was expecting. People like being with each other, looking people in the eyes and connecting.

The real work is far from the main stage, but we keep showing up.

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As I was carving the pumpkin last night, I thought about the incredible timing of the announcement from AI robotics company 1X. The NEO Home Robot is available for pre-order, just a few days before Halloween.

The NEO Home Robot is a “humanoid”, a robot resembling the shape of the human body able to walk around, move arms and turn heads. Its “soft knit suit and shoes” adds to the…realism?

1X is one of those companies where the founders were likely brought up on The Jetsons and Lost In Space, TV worlds where robots both did the housework and solved complex mathematical problems.

Having apparently deployed wheeled robots in factories, complete with faces similar to the drawn-on features of the humanoids in The Mitchells vs. the Machines, they are betting the farm on “consumer” humanoid robots helping out around the house.

1X’s mission states, “We believe that to truly understand the world and grow in intelligence, humanoid robots must live and learn alongside us.”

But why?? Haven’t they seen M3gan (pronounced Megan), Ex Machina, or Subservience? Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well for the humans. At least NEO has not taken the form of a girl/woman like the above I suppose.

As I searched “Is the NEO Home Robot a joke?” online, I realise it is not in fact an elaborate Halloween trick. Or indeed, a treat. You can secure your NEO Home Robot with a $200 deposit and pay either $20,000 for ownership or $499 per month.

As someone won’t even have an Alexa in the house, I find this concept fascinating and baffling. So many questions. Does the robot have a voice? Oh no, is the voice female?

I’ll admit, the idea of a robot stacking the dishwasher (properly) is appealing. Isn’t this what AI is meant to do- free us from mundane tasks so we can get on with saving the world etc? I’m reminded of the quote from fantasy and sci-fi author Joanna Maciejewska,

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The promotional video shows a couple playing cards while NEO lurks in the background doing the hoovering. There is the potential here for some pretty intense jump scares if you’re into that kind of thing. As I went through the list of tasks NEO can complete including, “opening the door for guests” and “turning the lights off at night” I realised NEO’s whole vibe is basically the best Halloween party ever. I wonder if I could have one just for a couple of days??

1X is not the only company producing consumer humanoids- the UK based company Humanoid also believes these robots are the future. In an interview with Sifted, chief strategy office Alina Kolpakova explained,

“We’re building the iPhone of the future…You will have a robot. I will have a robot. We won’t be able to live without our robots.”

Happy Halloween to all those who celebrate.

What you share and with who is a choice you control on Facebook. Privacy features put YOU in control on Instagram. You are empowered to manage your experience on TikTok. Snapchatters control and choose who to share content with or when to save it. “You have more control over your X experience than you might think”… apparently.

Viewed from a different perspective, these well-worded policies are ultimately placing responsibility and the burden on users for managing what they see on the platform, what they share and who with. But this is not a level playing field. A privacy setting here, an on-off toggle there masks the reality that fundamental design changes are necessary across entire platforms to realise true control and agency.

To illustrate: Let’s take the “back-to-school” photo. Every September children are snapped in hallways, on doorsteps and driveways on the first day of a new school year. Fresh uniforms, new shoes, smart haircuts and neat hairstyles, clutching new bags containing new pencil cases. Skirts might be rolled up another inch. Perhaps a little make up. Knees free of bruises and mud for now.

Another year, another milestone, can’t believe how much they’ve grown. This is a proud moment for parents to share with friends and family- isn’t that what social media is all about? As a parent you’ve taken in pages and pages of “parental resources” about online safety. You might even have read the NSPCC guidelines specifically about sharing back-to-school photos on social media safely. Your account is set to private and you don’t overly share photos of your kids (so called “sharenting”).

You’re in control.

Until you’re not.

This September, a 37 year old man tipped off The Guardian newspaper about something weird happening on Instagram and adverts in his feed repeatedly promoting signing up for Meta’s new platform, Threads. Launched as a rival to X (formerly Twitter) shortly after Elon Musk bought the platform, the ads promoting sign up to Threads exclusively featured “back-to-school” photos of young girls in their school uniforms- faces visible and sometimes with their names- which the man felt was “deeply inappropriate”.

The Guardian identified and spoke to the parents who had posted these photos of their children on Instagram. They were unaware, and horrified, the photos had been cross-posted and used promotionally to advertise Threads in this way. Accounts that were set both to private and public had back-to-school photos repurposed for targeted advertising in a way that was considered highly suggestive and provocative.

Meta’s explanation in the article was that these were adult accounts sharing photos that did not violate any policies. The “feature” of sharing profiles across Facebook, Instagram and Threads for the purpose of advertising the platforms can be turned off. This was no bug, it was by design.

What parent wants this? How would a parent dream that their photos would be used in this way, unless they found the right setting to prevent it, buried deep in the app? As one parent is quoted in The Guardian, “And who is responsible for creating that Threads ad using children’s photos to promote the platform for older men?”

Is there a setting for that too?

Last year, Meta began rolling out “Teen Accounts” on Instagram, with promises to limit who can contact teens, restrictions on viewing harmful content and controls for how long teens spend on the platform . Last week Meta announced they would enact PG-13 restrictions on content for both Instagram and Meta AI.

A report led by the Molly Rose Foundation and ParentSOS, organisations founded by parents whose teenage children took their own lives after being bombarded with self-harm content and bullying on Instagram, tested many of the safety tools for Teen Accounts listed on Meta’s website. The report, “Teen Accounts, Broken Promises: How Instagram Is Failing To Protect Minors”, found that many of the tools described by Meta did not work and several design choices undermined safety features. Researchers were unable to trigger default features such as filters meant to “hide” common offensive words or phrases to prevent harassment, or prevent being algorithmically shown harmful content, for example relating to eating disorders. Researchers were unable to trigger “nudges” that suggest a teen has spent a lot of time looking at one topic, a feature that could help prevent teens going down rabbit holes of harmful content. The report was concerned about design choices such as “rewarding” children with animations if they turn on “disappearing messages”, effectively deleting evidence of grooming or harassment.

The report describes “intentional friction” (making the process more difficult than it needs to be) to turn off the visibility of likes and shares on a post, and it is no longer possible to hide view counts. This is important to control because of the psychological impact of receiving likes, comments, and shares as validation, but it is also a core feature to keep users engaged on a platform.

Outside of teen accounts, and something worthy of much further analysis, the report “found evidence that suggested Instagram’s recommendation-based algorithm actively incentivized children under 13 to perform risky sexualized behaviors.” In what is described as “circulation risk” (where content is amplified outside of its intended context/audience) videos of young girls showing their bellies or singing songs with suggestive lyrics attract thousands and thousands of views, way more than their other posts. The report describes this as effectively rewarding children for this risky behaviour (through the attention garnered by receiving thousands of views) and teaching them that creating this kind of content gets attention, ultimately exposing them to harassment and harm.

A Meta spokesperson described the report as “dangerously misleading”.

This report is not the only analysis out there. Many whistleblowers from inside the company have gone public with documents demonstrating the company knew Instagram was harming teenager’s mental health. Most recently, whistleblowers have come forward about potential cover ups of harm to children from virtual reality products and the knowledge that Meta’s AI was permitted to have “romantic” and “sensual” chats with children.

It’s not just Meta. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found 13 year olds being shown harmful content on average every 39 seconds on TikTok.

This builds a picture of self-regulation at its worst, half hearted and ineffective. It is still unclear how new online safety regulation will force anything other than more “controls” or “choices” when in fact entire systems need rebuilding from scratch with different design, incentives and business models.

Whenever I’m asked about how I’m going to handle my children’s access to phones, one aspect is a clear line to navigate. Social media is a flat no. It’s not safe and we are not in control.