CyberSafe Scotland

💡 A really interesting story to discuss as a family tonight!

A company called Emergence set up virtual worlds this month - leaving AI agents to run each world.

In Claude’s world the agents were very orderly and set up a constitution and governance system. In ChatGPT’s world they talked a lot but didn’t make any decisions so nothing got built. In Grok’s world - the chatbot developed by Elon Musk - “all 10 agents were dead within 4 days”

“This revealed a big problem. We don’t really know how these systems will behave once they are left to run on their own.

Even when given strict rules, the simulations showed they broke them.”

when all the agents were put together in the same world 2 started a seemingly romantic relationship and only 3 survived.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Cwsa1cyVp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

If you’d like to learn more about AI, how it is changing child protection, and how to support your child to be safe - Cybersafe have parent and carer sessions that you can book through your school or parent council - just drop us a DM.

In the meantime - keep talking - remember the most important thing of all right now is to close the gap between adults and children around digital spaces. We can do this with all conversations and sharing knowledge! ❤️

If your child has a TikTok account, even if their account is set to private they will be impacted by this change. Check out the latest updates to the AI policy, how to opt out, and what you need to keep an eye on over the next few weeks👇

Link in comments 😁

This International Women’s Day we look to highlight the ongoing need for justice for women and girls in online spaces.

Victims of non-consensual intimate images are women in 90% of cases.

98% of deepfake videos are pornographic, and 99% of targets are women or girls.

Sexually harmful content and non consensual bot content is heavily promoted towards male accounts.

Bait and switch content where popular influencers normalise violence against women and girls is commonplace and both algorithmically promoted to individual users, but also hidden from safeguarders amongst swathes of other content.

Sexual harassment in gaming causes girls to play with male or gender neutral avatars, leave voice chat off or leave gaming spaces entirely.

All of these harms harm boys and men too as well as women and girls.

We all deserve and will benefit from digital spaces that are designed and secured to prevent inequality and abuse.

This International Women’s Day we call for safer product design to ensure “Rights. Justice. And Action. For ALL Women and Girls”

With the events of the last two days in global news, we wanted to share some support from psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg.

“The emotional alarm system (of the adolescent brain) is highly active, while the part of the brain responsible for perspective and long-range reasoning is still under construction.

When young people see footage of bombings or hear talk of escalation, they are not calmly analysing foreign policy. They are asking a far more personal question: is the world becoming unsafe?”

When parents say nothing, teenagers often fill the silence themselves — and adolescents are remarkably good at imagining worst-case scenarios. Silence, in this context, is not neutral.
It can be frightening.

The instinct for many adults is either to lecture or to reassure too quickly. Neither works. A long explanation about who is right or wrong politically will lose them within seconds, while dismissing the situation with "this has nothing to do with us" feels unconvincing in a world where conflict arrives live on their screens.

Teenagers are highly sensitive to emotional authenticity; they know when adults are pretending certainty they do not actually feel.

A better starting point is simple: "You’re probably seeing/hearing about this online — how is it making you feel”?

That question shifts the conversation away from ideology and towards wellbeing, which is where parents actually have influence. It signals safety, invites reflection and reduces anxiety far more effectively than delivering answers.

Young people also need perspective.
Social media often compresses the world into an emergency, showing dramatic moments without context or resolution. Parents can gently remind them that news platforms highlight crisis because crisis captures attention, while billions of people - diplomats, communities and ordinary citizens — are constantly working to prevent conflicts from spreading. Adolescents need scale to counter the distorted intensity of the online environment.”

We hope this is helpful today. If you feel as though you are pouring out of an empty cup this weekend that’s totally understandable - we hope you get a moment to rest and check in with friends and can also recommend https://www.breathingspace.scot/

💡Today, the information commissioner announced it was fining Reddit £14.47 million for failures to protect children’s privacy between May 2018 and July 2025 (link in comments). The ICO found that by not ensuring adequate age assurance during this period children may have been exposed to inappropriate and harmful content on the site.

As well as this being a positive action to hold platforms to account, it’s also a good moment for us to think and talk about the types of content children see on Reddit and how they see it. Did you know, for example, that one of the ways many children see Reddit content is through short form YouTube and Tiktok content (aka “Reddit stories”) that trend constantly?

These are screenshots of stories from Reddit looped over videos similar to ASMR content in the background to hold interest (shaving metal, cooking, fun textures etc)? They often end up on the children’s feeds because they are made to have two interest points - the text itself and the images or video behind it.

If Reddit are being fined we are keen to see whether YouTube and TikTok are going to be fined over much of this same content (differently packaged). Any questions about Reddit or that content, just let us know in the comments.