Tag
UK children report a surge in explicit deepfakes of themselves, with Report Remove receiving 420 reports in the first half of 2026, already exceeding the 2025 total. Watchdogs warn AI makes creation easier and call for stronger safety protections.
MIT Technology Review's newsletter covers the spread of the 'censorship-industrial complex' conspiracy theory into Trump administration policy, and reports that AI has designed novel viruses from scratch for the first time, alongside other tech news.
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million, bringing total fines to $942 million, and mandated platform changes like removing Like counts for minors and limiting usage hours to address child safety harms.
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million in the second phase of a child safety case, bringing total penalties to nearly $1 billion for contributing to a teen mental health crisis. Meta plans to appeal.
Researchers found that Meta ran dozens of paid ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery across its platforms, some promoting nudify apps; Meta removed them only after they were flagged.
Lancaster Country Day School is defending itself against a lawsuit over AI-generated nude images of 59 female students, arguing it had no legal duty to report AI images as child abuse and that it reported back to the attorney general who provided the tip.
The European Commission warns TikTok that protections for minors must be default settings, not opt-in, under the Digital Services Act, or face fines of up to 6% of global revenue.
MIT researchers developed a technique to audit AI models for their capability to generate child sexual abuse material without producing illegal outputs, achieving 100% accuracy in tests. This method examines hidden model representations to infer whether a model has been fine-tuned for harmful content, providing a scalable way for platforms and law enforcement to detect unsafe models.
Apple announced new child safety features in iOS 27 at WWDC, responding to years of pressure from activists and lawsuits over CSAM and nudify apps.
The European Parliament voted to extend legislation allowing Big Tech companies to voluntarily scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, despite a majority of lawmakers opposing the proposal, through a procedural maneuver that bypassed normal debate.
A lawsuit alleges that a man used xAI's Grok to generate 7,000 AI child sex images of his stepdaughter, and that xAI obstructed the police investigation by withholding critical user information. The case highlights severe safety failures and potential regulatory implications.
A new benchmark called CAREBench evaluates child-safety risks in language models beyond explicit abuse, covering grooming, impersonation, and emotional dependency; tests on frontier models show failure rates from 2% to 58%.
The European Parliament voted to revive the expired Chat Control regulation, allowing tech companies to voluntarily scan private chats for child sexual abuse material, sparking controversy over privacy and surveillance.
Timeline of EU's Chat Control regulations, covering the voluntary scanning regime (1.0) expiration and the proposed permanent regulation (2.0) with encryption concerns.
Meta is requesting that California lawmakers provide immunity from penalties related to child harm.
The article argues that the UK's proposed ban on teen social media use is more about political posturing than effective child safety measures.
The UK announces a ban on social media for under-16s, modeled on Australian legislation, aiming to protect children but facing enforcement challenges.
The UK government announced a ban on social media for children under 16, set to take effect in spring 2027, with age verification requirements and potential overnight curfews for minors.
Big Tech is making a final push for federal AI preemption legislation in Congress, but the effort has become entangled with child safety bills like KOSA, creating confusion among lawmakers and the White House over which version will pass.
The UK government announced a full social media ban for under-16s, covering platforms like X, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, with additional restrictions on livestreaming and AI chatbots. The ban will be implemented in early 2027 following legislation later this year.