Happy Thursday everyone and welcome to our new subscribers as there have been quite a few this week. And we are delighted you are here!

A quick lesson this week in making sure we are reading credible information when it relates to learning more about our children and technology. One of the most useful habits a parent can develop, in a year when official warnings about children's screens are arriving from every direction, is the habit of reading laterally. It's a phrase Stanford researchers coined to describe what professional fact-checkers actually do when they encounter a document. They don't read the source more carefully, they open new tabs and look for what other credible people say about it. Ten minutes of doing that on any document can usually tell you more about it than an hour spent inside it.

This week's issue is partly an argument for that habit. One of the stories is a careful read of a recent federal advisory, useful both because parents will have seen the headlines, and because the same method applies to whatever document arrives next.

The other story applies the same instinct to a platform whose reputation has probably been more favourable than the majority of social media platforms in most parents' heads and asks whether that reputation still describes what's actually there.

So, grab your coffee, here’s what’s been happening this week.

— Heidi

The UK regulator Ofcom published a platform-by-platform breakdown last Thursday of what six of the biggest platforms children use have agreed to do about child safety, and what they have not. It is the first time a regulator anywhere has put on the public record which platforms moved and which dug in. The platforms named are: Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snap, TikTok and YouTube. These commitments matter no matter where your child lives.

Snap agreed to the most. Adults will be blocked from contacting children on Snapchat by default. Children will no longer be prompted to add people they do not know to expand their friendship groups. Snap will roll out age assurance to all UK users over the summer, which means the protections apply to every under-18 account, not just the ones Snap already knows are children. This is the most significant default-setting change any platform has made in years.

Meta agreed to use AI to detect sexualised conversations between adults and teenagers in Instagram direct messages, and to report flagged accounts to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Teenagers' followers and following lists will be hidden by default. Meta is extending its "13+ sensitive content" control from Instagram to Facebook. What Meta would not agree to: switching off Instagram's "people you may know" prompts for children entirely. The regulator wanted that. Meta declined.

Roblox confirmed parents will be able to switch off direct messaging entirely for children under 16. The new Roblox Kids and Roblox Select account types roll out globally in June, with stricter chat and content settings by default depending on age.

TikTok and YouTube refused to change how their algorithmic feeds push content to children. Both claimed their feeds are already safe. Ofcom's own research, published the same day, found that 73% of UK 11 to 17 year-olds had encountered harmful content online in a single four-week window, with TikTok the platform most frequently named. Ofcom said it is "deeply concerned" and signalled it will use stronger powers under the Online Safety Act to force changes.

What this means for you right now:

The Snapchat default changes only protect children whose accounts the platform knows are under 18. If your child has Snapchat, check that the date of birth on the account is correct. Open Snapchat, tap the profile icon (top-left), tap the settings cog (top-right), tap "Name, Birthday & Birthday Party." If the year is wrong because your child signed up with a fake birthday, the new protections will not apply to them.

On Instagram, the new AI detection in DMs will run automatically. The hidden-followers default only applies to Teen Accounts. Check your child's Instagram is set as a Teen Account. Open Instagram, go to Settings, then "Account type and tools."

On Roblox, the option to switch off direct messaging will need to be turned on by you. It will not switch on automatically for existing accounts. Settings → Parental Controls → Communication.

On TikTok and YouTube, nothing has changed and nothing is changing. The available family controls (TikTok's Family Pairing, YouTube's supervised account experience) remain the most useful tools, and both are worth setting up if you have not already.

Read more: Ofcom names the platforms protecting children — and the ones refusing →

The US Department of Health and Human Services published a 43-page document last Wednesday titled "Surgeon General's Warning on the Harms of Screen Use." The headlines that followed were broadly the same: official US health body says screens are dangerous and parents must act.

If you saw any version of that headline, the document underneath it is not quite what it appears.

There is no Surgeon General. The office has been vacant since January 2025. The advisory was written by HHS political appointees and signed off by Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. It was not peer-reviewed (which the document acknowledges). Its methodology note states that HHS ChatGPT-5.3 was used for text editing, which means a federal warning about the harms of AI chatbots to children was edited by an AI chatbot. A full-page graphic on page 15 claims nearly 5 out of 10 teenagers have experienced cyberbullying but the paper it cites does not contain that statistic; the actual figure from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey is 16%. The advisory is wrapped in a "Live Real Life" campaign, paralleled with Kennedy's earlier "Eat Real Food" branding under the Make America Healthy Again strategic plan.

The people pointing out these anomalies are researchers. Jacqueline Nesi at Brown, Andrew Przybylski at Oxford, Amy Orben at Cambridge, Whitney Raglin Bignall at the Kids Mental Health Foundation have spent their careers researching this and all say roughly the same thing: the effects of screens are smaller and more conditional than the headlines suggest, the evidence is mostly associational rather than causal, and the right questions are about what children are doing on the screen, not how many minutes they spend on it.

What this means for you right now:

When professional fact-checkers were studied by Stanford researchers in 2017, they did one thing other readers did not. They did not read the source more carefully. They opened new tabs and looked for what other credible people said about it. The Stanford team called this lateral reading, and it is now what most professional fact-checkers do.

For a parent reading "Surgeon General Warns" in the morning, lateral reading means spending ten minutes finding what independent researchers say about the document, before acting on the headline. Search for the names of academic researchers in the field and see whether they are quoted approving, criticising, or absent.

Ten minutes of lateral reading on this advisory would have led you to the researchers above. Use this habit next time you see an advisory, from whichever government publishes it.

Read the full piece: How to read an official warning about your child's screen time, without taking it on trust →

Pinterest is the platform most parents associate with Molly Russell's death in 2017. In 2022 a UK coroner ruled that Pinterest content contributed to her suicide and Pinterest's own head of community operations agreed, under oath, that the platform was not safe at the time.

Pinterest is also the platform that has done more work since 2017 than any of its peers.

What the platform has actually changed. Under-16 accounts are now private by default. Messaging is restricted to mutual followers only. Comments are off by default for everyone under 18. Direct messaging was paused entirely after the Molly Russell case and reintroduced cautiously. A parental passcode was added in 2024, which lets a parent lock changes to their teen's settings for messaging, privacy and account management. Weight-loss adverts were banned in 2021, the first major platform to do so. Pinterest does not allow beauty filters at all.

The Molly Rose Foundation, set up by Molly Russell's family, analysed transparency data from six major platforms in early 2025. They concluded that most were "substantially failing to respond to the risk profile of their products." Pinterest was the one platform they singled out as "notably" investing in proactive identification and removal of suicide and self-harm content. That endorsement from that foundation is the strongest possible signal that something real has changed.

What still has not. The algorithm is the same algorithm. Pinterest is fundamentally a “more-like-this” engine. A teen who searches "fitness inspiration" or "diet" is one or two clicks from disordered-eating content and a teen who searches "self-care" can find pins that romanticise low mood. The platform's own most recent EU transparency report acknowledged removing 1.1 million pins for self-injury content in a single four-month period; evidence that enforcement is happening and that there is a lot to enforce. There is also no parent-side supervision: no Family Center equivalent, no way to see what your teen is pinning or who they are following.

What this means for you right now:

Three actions if your teen uses Pinterest, in order of priority.

Set up the parental passcode. This is the single most useful action available. With a passcode in place, your teen cannot change their messaging settings, account privacy, or content preferences without it. The passcode is set inside your teen's account, so you will need to do it with them. Without it, every default setting can be reversed at any time.

Have a specific conversation about the algorithm. Not a general internet safety conversation but a specific one about how Pinterest's algorithm works. Tell them that the platform shows more of whatever they engage with, and that engagement includes lingering on an image or scrolling past slowly. If their feed starts to make them feel worse rather than better, the algorithm won't know that. They have to notice. The action is to actively engage with different content, or to use the hide-this-pin option.

Pay attention to their boards, not their pins. A teenager's secret board on Pinterest is the digital equivalent of a notebook in a drawer. You do not need to read every pin. But if your teen has stopped showing you what they are working on, and previously did, ask a few questions.

We have added Pinterest to the Wired Parents Scorecard this week; it sits at 2.5, in the middle of the social platform band.

Read the full piece: Is Pinterest safe for kids? After Molly Russell, what changed →

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Instagram quietly removed end-to-end encryption from direct messages on 8 May. Meta stated the reason was low adoption. The likelier reason sits eleven days later in the US calendar: the Take It Down Act came into force on 19 May, requiring platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery within 48 hours of a takedown notice, a compliance bar platforms cannot meet for messages they cannot read. Instagram DMs were never truly private, and now they are definitively not. Read the full piece →

The UK consultation on children's online lives closed at 11:59pm on Monday. It asked whether the UK should ban social media for under-16s, restrict addictive design features, raise the digital age of consent above 13, and bring AI chatbots into scope. Bereaved families met the Prime Minister the same afternoon and were told the government's response will come "in weeks, not months." Whatever the UK does is likely to shape what some other countries do next and so is worth watching.

The Roblox Kids and Roblox Select account changes are due to roll out globally in June.

Snap's UK age assurance rollout begins over the summer. The first sign of when, and how, will be worth watching.

Till next Thursday....

— Heidi