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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Parents/Carers News

14 June 2024

"Vote Reform UK", "Only Reform UK has a real plan for Britain" - an account on X has posted these and similar messages every couple of hours since the start of the election campaign.

The account, GenZBloomer, is one of dozens across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok which the BBC has identified as posting hundreds of repeated messages in comment threads expressing support for Reform UK.

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29 May 2024

Criminals are selling guides on social media on how to carry out sextortion, BBC News has learned.

The guides show people how to pose as young women online, trick a victim into sending sexually explicit material and then blackmail them.

On Tuesday, Olamide Shanu appeared in court in London. He is believed to be part of a gang that made £2m from blackmailing adults and children online.

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29 April 2024

On April 17, 2024, an account named StorieSpot posted images of a purported "cat's eye dazzle" flower in the Facebook group National Geographic Wild Planet. (The group, which has more than 1.4 million members, does not appear to have any official affiliation with National Geographic.) According to the pictures, the flower closely resembles a kitten's face.

The post read, "Amazing plants! Cat's eye dazzle." It received more than 80,000 likes and 36,000 shares, at the time of this writing.

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23 April 2024

Sexual predators are grooming children under six into performing “disturbing” acts of sexual abuse via phones or webcams a charity has warned.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said it had discovered more than two thousand remotely filmed child abuse images of three to six-year-olds online in 2023.

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19 April 2024

Nearly a quarter of UK five-to-seven-year-olds now have their own smartphone, Ofcom research suggests.

Social media use also rose in the age group over last year with nearly two in five using messaging service WhatsApp, despite its minimum age of 13.

The communications regulator warned parental enforcement of rules "appeared to be diminishing."

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15 April 2024

For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student Ben Cohen was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people.

The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned Mr Cohen into an internet villain.

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