Yet another story underlining the awful status quo we’ve created in normalising children’s access to violent porn. Rowing back from this is an urgent moral imperative. Limiting smartphones to over 16s would be a significant step in the right direction. thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

Roblox has been labelled a “paedophile hellscape” by Hindenburg Research... users of Roblox were openly trading child abuse images and... young users were exposed to grooming, pornography and violence. Full story here: bit.ly/3Yicck3

It is blatantly obvious UK Prime Minister must do more to protect children online. As NSPCC reports Snapchat as the most used app for grooming parents are forced to create fake profiles to catch and report child predators bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

Why do we have legal minimum ages? To protect kids from at least 4 harms: graphic sex, graphic violence, addiction, & health/safety hazards. Social media exposes kids to all 4. Scott Galloway and I explain why social media should be age-gated: afterbabel.com/p/scott-gallow…

The failures to protect children from rape gangs, gender surgery and the online Wild West all have the same root. We have told ourselves that children are mini-adults with ‘rights’ & that their autonomy must be respected. Children can either have rights OR they can be protected.

My open letter to the Education Secretary ⁦Bridget Phillipson⁩ Many teachers and school leaders share my concerns with regard to her decisions but are scared to say. If you can find it in you, please RT. My letter is also here: spectator.co.uk/article/what-p…

🆕 More in Common research with New Britain for National Education Union finds three quarters of Britons support increasing the age at which young people can access social media to 16. Support spans all age groups and supporters of all parties.

An article in the Atlantic suggested that the "loneliness epidemic" is a myth, just another moral panic. But Jean Twenge (author of GENERATIONS, iGEN) shows that it is real and big for young poeple, and it began around 2012. generationtechblog.com/p/for-teens-th…

Watch Sophie Winkleman on why we need to take action on kids, tech and the big fat con of edtech: youtu.be/7V6nucKFK88?fe…

We need to talk about the education deficit caused by student facing tech in the classroom 👇 “The soaring promise of technology in the classroom has failed to deliver results while imposing great costs on children and taxpayers” Mike Bloomberg Jonathan Haidt bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Ed-tech may have done more harm than good during the COVID school closures. Our latest at After Babel: a summary of the free book "An EdTech Tragedy?" by UNESCO's Mark West. afterbabel.com/p/edtech-trage…

Keir Starmer is wrong here. Misguided and perhaps misadvised by Department for Education It is simply untrue to state that the majority of schools have an effective ban on smartphones during the school day.

Dishing out iPADS to encourage kids back to school ... urgh. Has anyone at Department for Education paused to ask whether the relentless digitisation of education might not be a key driver of plummeting attendance rates?

‘Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale’ Read here afterbabel.com/p/industrial-s…

Great piece on the mounting parental concern around EdTech. “We seem to have forgotten that EdTech platforms are, by and large, not created by altruistic child-centred benefactors, but by hard-nosed companies, many private equity-owned, whose raison d’être is to make profit by

You would not believe the quotations we have from inside TikTok. They know what they are doing to children including the addiction ("compulsive use") and attention fragmentation. You've got to read the quotations yourself: afterbabel.com/p/industrial-s…

Here is Kemi Badenoch actually visiting schools and talking to pupils who, by the way, all agree that there should be a ban on smartphones in schools for under 16s. Keir Starmer Daniel Kebede

As parents make progress on the first norm (no smartphone before 14), they increasingly notice that schools are putting screens on their kids' desks and gamifying the school day. ⁦Hadley Freeman, in The Times and The Sunday Times, lays out why this must change: thetimes.com/comment/column…

Under the data bill, the Coroner can now request #socialmedia data, but only IF the police or the coroner asks for it. Like me and many other parents I know, they never bothered preserving and requesting the child's data. I know of another parent right now, 12 weeks after