Happy Thursday everyone.

Instagram launched Instants this week — a Snapchat-style disappearing photos feature, with one detail that should worry every parent: the moment your teen taps the shutter, the photo sends. No preview. No confirmation. Straight to every mutual follower on their account, by default. Meta did build supervision into it — access restricted between 10pm and 7am, parents notified when a teen downloads the standalone app. But none of that helps if the feature is built to send before your teen has time to think.

Small steps backwards on this one from the company a jury has already found liable for harming children.

Proud to say we also went live today with four new apps added to The Scorecard. We also have a Wired Parents recommended age on every card, plus a rating on bullying. So go check that out; we will keep updating.

Also in this issue: Roblox quietly raising the age on its most popular games, which took effect on Monday. And the photos your child's school publishes online — and why every parent reading this should be having a conversation with their school about them.

Coffee. Let's go.

— Heidi

The scorecard now rates twenty platforms across seven categories. For the first time, every card carries a Wired Parents recommended age alongside the platform's own stated minimum. The gap between the two is wider than most parents would guess.

Four platforms are new to the scorecard this week: Reddit, Threads, Twitch, and Kick. All four sit on Australia's banned-for-under-16s list, which came into force on 10 December 2025. None of them had been mainstream parent-safety territory until Australia put them there. All four are now widely used by teens worldwide.

Kick is the lowest-rated platform on the entire scorecard. Owned by the same parent company as the crypto-gambling site Stake.com, gambling streams are its number-one content category. In August 2025 a French streamer died on Kick during a 280-hour livestreamed broadcast that allegedly involved abuse. The French government is now prosecuting Kick. The platform publishes no transparency reports at all. Its stated minimum age is 13.

We have also added a seventh category: bullying. The original six cover what platforms do to children: content, contact, data, controls. They do not directly capture what children do to each other on those platforms, which is the risk most parents see in their own homes. Snapchat, X, and Kick score severe risk on the new category. WhatsApp scores high risk: the structural protections are strong, but group chats are where most teen bullying happens, and end-to-end encryption means parents cannot see what's said.

What this means for you right now:

Open the scorecard. Find every app your child uses. The recommended age and the bullying score are on each card.

If the recommended age is higher than your child's actual age, understand what you are allowing your child access to before you say yes.

If your child uses Reddit, Twitch, or Kick, know that no parental controls exist on those platforms. Account settings can be reversed by the child. Oversight depends on the conversations you have, not on the tools.

See the scorecard: The Wired Parents Platform Safety Scorecard →

From 19 May, a 14-year-old who could play Berry Avenue-style roleplay games on Roblox yesterday may not be able to play them today. Roblox has raised the minimum age for three of its biggest content categories (Social Hangouts, Free-form User Creation, and Sensitive Issues) from 13+ to 16+, with ID verification required to access any of them.

This is the second step of a story that started in late April, when Roblox announced new account tiers: Roblox Kids (5–8) and Roblox Select (9–15). Together with the 19 May change, the platform is now segmented by age in a way it has never been before. The most popular roleplay content is now behind an ID gate that requires the user to prove they are 16 or older.

Berry Avenue is one of the most-played games on the entire platform and a 14-year-old who logged in yesterday will hit the new restriction today. Children who were playing perfectly age-appropriate roleplay content yesterday are now being told they're too young, with little fanfare from Roblox.

The temptation will be to ID-verify your under-16 child to get them back in. But don’t do it. The whole point of the change is that Roblox has decided, on the evidence of its own content moderation data, that these game categories are not appropriate for under-16s. If a 16+ gate has been added, your 14-year-old being able to play is not a workaround. It's an override of the safety judgement the platform has just made.

In the same week as the age change, Roblox also launched Cross-Server Chat globally — a separate update that's getting much less attention but matters just as much. Until last week, a child in a Roblox game could only chat with the other players in their server, usually a maximum of 20 people. From last week, they can chat with players across every Roblox server in their age group at once. Roblox is presenting age-grouping as the safety control. But on the Roblox developer forum itself, the company admits the chat filter is "imperfect at catching links" — which means a single scam message can now reach hundreds of children in the same age bracket instead of twenty. The 16+ gate tightens one risk. Cross-Server Chat opens another. Both happened the same week.

What this means for you right now:

If your child is under 16 and is upset because a game has disappeared, the message is simple: the platform changed the rules, not you. The new rules are based on what Roblox itself now believes is age-appropriate, which is closer to what most parents have been asking for than what the platform offered before.

Do not ID-verify your under-16 to bypass the restriction. The verification creates a record of an account-holder over 16, which then carries over to other Roblox features and other platforms using the same ID infrastructure. The short-term peace at home is not worth the long-term loss of the protection.

If your child is 16+ and the verification has already happened, treat it as a moment to check the rest of their Roblox account: friend list, chat settings (especially the new Global tab in chat — they can now talk to thousands of strangers in their age bracket), what they're spending money on. The age change is one of several Roblox is rolling out, with new account tiers landing in June.

Read more: Roblox just raised the age for its most popular games to 16 →

The simplest, most ordinary thing your child's school does has just become something you need to start thinking about: publishing a photo of pupils on the website, on Facebook, on Instagram, in the newsletter. A UK secondary school was blackmailed late last year by criminals who scraped pupil photos from its website and social media accounts, fed them through AI tools, and produced 150 images the Internet Watch Foundation classified as child sexual abuse material under UK law. The criminals demanded money to keep the images offline. The IWF says this was not an isolated case.

The story was first reported by the Guardian on 8 May and is now backed by joint guidance from the UK's National Crime Agency, the Internet Watch Foundation, and the Early Warning Working Group (whose members include the NSPCC, Education Scotland, the Welsh Government and the Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland). The guidance to schools is clear: review the use of pupil images, avoid face-on photos with names attached, and consider whether the photo serves a real purpose or is simply habit. The Loughborough Schools Foundation has already redesigned its website to remove recognisable images. Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips called it a "deeply worrying emerging threat."

This is not a story you can fix on your child's phone. The risk does not sit on a device your family controls. It sits on the website of every school, sports club, scout group, dance studio, faith group and PTA that has been publishing children's photos because it's what they've always done. Because no one has had reason to ask whether they still should.

The Report Remove service for under-18s received 394 blackmail reports from children last year, a 34% rise on 2024. Most of the conversation about sextortion until now has been about teenagers sharing images themselves. This is something different: ordinary photos, taken by an adult, published with consent, manipulated by a stranger.

What this means for you right now:

This is a conversation to have with your school, not a setting to change on a phone. Three things worth asking:

One. What is the school's policy on publishing identifiable photographs of pupils on the website, on social media accounts, and in newsletters? When was it last reviewed?

Two. Has the school seen the new guidance from the UK Online Harms Early Warning Working Group, published 8 May 2026? If not, the UK Safer Internet Centre hosts it.

Three. What is your own consent? Schools usually ask for blanket permission to use photos when a child joins. You can revisit that. You can ask for your child's image to be removed from public-facing pages without removing them from internal records or yearbooks. Most schools will not have been asked this before. You will not be the difficult parent. You will be the first parent.

This is the kind of conversation that's easier when one parent starts it. If you raise it at the school gate, with the PTA WhatsApp, or in a quick email to the head, you make it easier for the next parent to raise it too. That's how this kind of thing changes: one parent at a time, until the policy catches up with the threat.

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.

That’s what this newsletter delivers.

The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.

Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.

Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.

Sign Up Free

🇬🇦 Gabon — new entry on the tracker. On 8 April 2026 Gabon published an ordinance setting the digital age of majority at 16. Under-16s are allowed accounts only with parental consent. Notably, the age verification process requires users to provide their name, address, and personal identification number — significantly more intrusive than what Australia, the EU, or the UK have introduced. First African country to legislate at this level.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica — File 25536, the bill that would ban social media accounts for under-14s and require parental consent for 14–17s, advanced unanimously out of committee on 14 April 2026. Age verification would be handled through Costa Rica's minor identification card (TIM). The bill now moves to debate and a full vote, with no date set.

See where every country stands on the Wired Parents Country Tracker, updated every Thursday. See the tracker →

Instagram has launched "Instants" — but there’s a problem with the design. Globally available from 13 May. The feature looks like a Snapchat snap: a photo, viewed once, gone in 24 hours. But the way it works is worse. The moment your teen presses the shutter, the photo sends to every mutual follower on their account, by default. No preview screen. No confirmation step. The toggle to switch from "Friends" to "Close Friends" sits below the shutter — but defaults to Friends every time you open it. Users have been flooding Reddit with stories of accidental sends. Meta did bundle in teen-account supervision (10pm–7am restrictions, parents notified when a teen downloads the standalone app), but the feature is built to send before your teen has time to think. No setting fixes that. What to do: open Instagram with your teen this weekend and walk through it together. To hide Instants from their inbox entirely: Profile → three-line menu → Settings → Content Preferences → "Hide Instants in Inbox."

YouTube's AI age-detection system is in live testing in the US. The system doesn't scan faces. It watches account behaviour (what gets searched, what gets watched, how old the account is) and if it decides the user is under 18, the account is automatically dropped into the protected teen experience. Adults wrongly flagged can verify with ID or credit card. This is the first major platform to override a user's declared age based on behaviour. If it works in testing, expect global rollout.

YouTube, Snap and TikTok have settled the first US school districts case. Meta hasn't. On Friday, three of the four major defendants in the federal social media addiction litigation settled with Breathitt County School District in Kentucky days before trial. The district had been seeking over $60 million. Meta is now the only defendant in the bellwether trial, which begins on 15 June. When other platforms settle, Meta keeps fighting. Three out of four chose to write a cheque rather than face a jury.

Ofcom's compliance report on the six major platforms was promised for May. It hasn't landed yet. When it does, fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global turnover are on the table for any platform Ofcom isn't satisfied with.

The UK consultation on "Growing Up in the Online World" closes Tuesday 26 May. If you've been meaning to respond, this is the last week. Ten minutes on gov.uk.

The New Mexico Meta trial. Last week we said a ruling could land within a fortnight. The state rested its case on 13 May. Meta now puts on its defence, then closing arguments, then Judge Biedscheid deliberates. That fortnight estimate looks tight. We'll cover the ruling when it lands.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has called four CEOs to Capitol Hill on 23 June. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Shou Zi Chew (TikTok), and Evan Spiegel (Snap). The hearing is titled "Examining Tech Industry Practices and the Implications for Users and Families: Is This Social Media's Big Tobacco Moment?" It's the first time the four have been collectively summoned since the New Mexico and LA verdicts in March.

Till next Thursday....

— Heidi