How can we help make children safe online? Our next steps

1) Prove that platforms are safe and age-appropriate before children can use them

Our Wild West Web campaign helped lead to the Online Safety Act, which means platforms now have important duties to keep children safe – like checking which users are over 18 to access pornography and harmful content. But we know that we need to go further to protect children.

For example, we need age-appropriate protections around public sharing of young people’s locations, gaming with strangers, and receiving messages from strangers on social media profiles.

“There’s lots of terrible things happening in the world, like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. I’ve seen a bunch of videos of the frontline which were full of dead people – it was like a horror movie. Whenever I feel happy, my mind suddenly comes back to this and then I don’t feel happy anymore. How do I stop seeing the world so negatively even though these bad things are happening?” Girl, 12, Childline*

We’re calling for risk-based age limits for children – like we see with film ratings. And we need to see these age limits meaningfully enforced, with tech companies using highly effective age assurance to protect children from using sites that aren’t suitable for them. If existing age limits were enforced effectively right now, 2.5 million children under the age of 13 would be better protected.

3) Build safety into every device, platform and AI tool, so children do not see harmful content or illegal images

Right now, children are experiencing abuse and exploitation online. This should spur us all into action. In 2025, police forces logged almost 37,000 child sexual abuse image crimes across the UK. That number has been rising, and many more cases are likely to go unreported.

Promisingly, there are steps that the Government and tech companies can take to stop this abuse immediately. Technology to block illegal images in real time already exists. This should be built in as standard on children’s phones and devices to help stop them from receiving, viewing or sending nude images.

This isn’t just about social media. We’re also concerned about the rise of illegal images generated by AI chatbots, like Grok, as well as in private messaging services and gaming. The Government needs to make sure protections against this are watertight, as well as making sure children aren’t given dangerous or misleading information by AI chatbots. To make that happen, child protection must be at the heart of how online platforms are designed.