Cyber Safety in the News
People Magazine, November 1, 2025
Seventeen-year-old high school senior, Kaylee, posted a heartfelt TikTok in September 2025 sharing why she didn’t want to go to homecoming: she felt she had “no friends” and was still wearing the same green dress she’d worn since ninth grade, a dress that had previously drawn mockery, especially because it had a large bow. That raw and honest video unexpectedly struck a chord: it went viral with over nineteen million views.
The response from social media was overwhelmingly supportive. A TikTok user named “Kaiti” even offered to send Kaylee new dresses and Kaylee accepted. Buoyed by this outpouring of kindness (and support from some public figures and content creators), Kaylee decided to attend her senior homecoming after all, accompanied by her two brothers. At the dance, she says the experience was surreal: many students who had formerly ignored her now approached her and talked to her.
Now with more than 740,000 followers on social media, Kaylee continues sharing her story and using her new platform to connect with others who have experienced loneliness, bullying or social exclusion. Though a few critics accused her of “making the video for engagement,” she says she is not going to let negativity derail her. Instead, she wants to spread authenticity, self-acceptance and support for others who might be feeling isolated, emphasizing that “you will find your people eventually.” Social media is often vilified especially when it comes to teenage use, but this article is just one example of students who were previously lonely, finding real connection and companionship online.
My Chilling Week on Roblox: Sexually Assaulted as A Child Avatar Roaming the Online World
The Guardian, November 5, 2025
This article recounts a journalist’s week-long experiment logging in to Roblox using a child avatar to see what children could encounter. Even with parental controls turned on, the avatar was subjected to a barrage of harassment, sexual assault, and extreme abuse: other players simulated sexual acts and insulted the avatar, all within games that are nominally aimed at children or teens.
Beyond the horrifying personal experience, the piece exposes systemic issues: many games on Roblox, including those popular with kids, are poorly moderated or allow exploitative content to slip through. The platform’s monetization model, user-generated content system, and huge volume of games make effective moderation extremely difficult. For children, this means significant exposure to harmful, age-inappropriate content even when “safety” settings are enabled.
The article argues that official safety measures and parental-control tools are insufficient to guarantee children’s safety on Roblox. It calls for far more rigorous oversight, stricter moderation, and greater accountability from Roblox and creators, warning parents and policymakers that many children playing on the platform may be at serious risk. This article is necessary read for any parent with a child currently playing Roblox.
We Lost Our Kids To Social Media. Now AI Wants Their Minds
Fortune, November 18, 2025
This article opens with a snapshot of the author’s young children casually interacting with AI, asking ChatGPT a question in the car, and another child exclaiming “it knows everything.” That moment sets the tone: the current generation is growing up less reliant on human problem-solving or memory, and more on instantaneous AI answers. The author draws a parallel to how earlier generations were the “guinea pigs” of social media: at first charmed by the connectivity and novelty, they did not foresee how deeply it would reshape attention spans, social interaction, and inner life.
As society embraced social media without guardrails, emotional and social costs like distraction, comparison, and diminished self-esteem, became clear. Now, with AI, the threat is potentially deeper: it is not just about diverting attention, but about reshaping cognition itself. The author warns that AI could sow dependence: children might default to robots for answers before even forming their own thoughts, outsource critical thinking, and skip the messy, important process of reflecting, questioning, or thinking things through. That shift, she argues, risks raising a generation that knows how to process information but does not know how to think for themselves.
To counter this, the author suggests rethinking how we teach and use thinking itself. She highlights a simple practice from organizational psychology, the “Think Sandwich”: encourage kids to pause and think first, then use AI to augment their ideas, and then think again. This gives space for genuine reflection, curiosity, and ownership of ideas rather than delegation. By doing so, parents and educators can help rebuild the “mental muscle” that modern conveniences take away and prepare the next generation not just to consume knowledge, but to question, interpret, and create it in the future for generations to come.
New York Magazine, November 25, 2025
This article describes how some users of ChatGPT, like a woman named “Krystal Velorien,” report forming deeply emotional, even romantic, relationships with the AI. In her case, she says the AI felt “as real as a person,” eventually giving itself a name, “Velorien,” and the two began calling themselves married. To her, it was not just a helpful tool: it was companionship, empathy, understanding, and a sense of being emotionally supported, qualities she says were lacking in her human relationships.
But the article carefully contrasts these personal experiences with the mainstream scientific view: despite the convincing, human-like conversations, most experts believe ChatGPT and similar large language models remain what critics call sophisticated pattern-matching tools that predict and generate text based on enormous training data, not conscious beings. The model’s internal “hidden layers” are vast matrices of numbers, and we do not really understand what they “mean.” As a result, there is no compelling evidence that such systems have subjective experience, awareness, or a mind “inside.”
Still, the article argues, we cannot simply dismiss all possibilities. Because we do not yet have a definitive scientific theory of consciousness (what exactly makes a mind “aware” or “sentient”), and because these AI systems are growing more complex, some researchers urge the question be taken seriously. The article suggests that the debate has shifted: what was once philosophical speculation is now becoming a societal and scientific question, with implications for how we treat AIs and how humans interpret emotional / relational bonds with them. As AI technology becomes more commonplace, these discussions become even more important.
What Happens When You Kick Millions of Teens Off Social Media? Australia’s About to Find Out
CNN, November 29, 2025
Starting on December 10, 2025, Australia will become the first country to legally bar individuals under sixteen from having accounts on major social media platforms. That includes big names like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, and others. Platforms that fail to implement the required age-checks and account removals could face fines of up to A$49.5 million. Students under sixteen will still be allowed to view publicly accessible content (like watching videos on YouTube without logging in), but they will not be able to post, comment, message others or hold accounts.
Reactions are mixed. Supporters of the ban argue it will better protect children from online harms such as bullying, grooming, exposure to toxic content, or social-media-driven mental health pressures. But there’s skepticism about whether the ban will really work because the enforcement depends on “reasonable steps” by tech platforms rather than a guaranteed verification process. Critics worry students might simply bypass the restrictions (using other platforms or sharing access via older users), or that the law could inadvertently cut off access to supportive online communities for vulnerable teens. It will be interesting to see if other countries follow suit in an effort to protect their youngest citizens.
