Category: Research Updates

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #15

    CAISE Notes – Issue #15

    This week: the government bans social media for under-16s and sets an age limit on companion chatbots; more scientists point to a lack of firm evidence on all of this; two major reports land on how children actually use AI.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and if you have, can I join you there??), you’ll know that the UK government announced on Monday that it will ban social media for under-16s and force AI “romantic companion” chatbots to enforce an age limit of 18. Five days earlier, the neuroscientists best placed to judge the evidence had told a select committee they can’t prove much of what the announcement assumes — and that the gap is widest where the new AI rules sit.

    Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of Cambridge was asked what we know about the impact of social media on the adolescent brain. Her answer, as reported by The Register, was “almost nothing” — a few small studies, unreplicated, purely correlational. Professor Denis Mareschal of Birkbeck said much the same about young children: very little causal research, almost everything correlational. Pressed on whether neuroscience could identify the right age for a social media cut-off, Blakemore said it can’t: individual differences in brain development are vast.

    This is not the same as saying there’s nothing to worry about, and the witnesses didn’t say that. Blakemore described how an adolescent’s reward system is highly active while the self-control machinery is still being built, which makes a phone genuinely hard to put down.

    But here is the part that matters most for this newsletter, and it’s the part that didn’t make the headline. When the committee turned to AI companions, the answer got fuzzier, not clearer. Blakemore was reported as saying that “we don’t really have any evidence, and that’s one area where I think we really urgently need new evidence.” The open research question she named is the one this whole field turns on — whether children interpret a chatbot “just like they would be interpreting a friend’s behaviour and suggestions and mental states.”

    That question is not hypothetical. The Common Sense Media census this week found that one in four children who use AI to discuss their feelings sometimes feel it understands them better than most people do. UNICEF’s brief documents the same parasocial pull and the regulatory scramble around it. So we have a UK government setting an age-18 line on companion chatbots in the same announcement as the social media ban — and the social media ban, on the neuroscientists’ own account, rests on thin evidence, while the chatbot rule rests on almost none.

    Again: this doesn’t make either measure wrong. The precautionary principle is a real and important tool. But it’s worth being clear-eyed that the AI half of Monday’s announcement is the part most starved of evidence about what the technology is actually doing to children. We’re going to do our best to help add to that corpus!

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens, 2026 — Common Sense Media

    The headline number is that 86 percent of US children aged 9 to 17 now use AI, with about a quarter using it daily. Among children who have used AI to discuss their feelings or personal problems, one in four say they sometimes feel AI understands them better than most people do. That rises among children who find it hard to make friends.

    The report is careful where it should be. It states plainly that a single survey cannot tell us whether AI use causes loneliness or whether lonely children are simply more likely to reach for it. That distinction matters, and a lot of the coverage will drop it. This is a US sample of 1,204 children, surveyed in March, so it describes American childhood, not British. But the pattern — heavy use correlating with lower reported happiness, the cause running in an unknown direction — is exactly the kind of finding that gets flattened into “AI is making children lonely” by the time it reaches a parent. It doesn’t say that. It says we need to find out. Which is precisely what Blakemore told the committee. And it’s important to note as a parent that 3 out of 4 children are not at that point. So now is the time for (positively framed) intervention.

    2. When AI becomes a friend: child rights risks, harms, and regulatory responses to AI chatbots and companions — UNICEF

    UNICEF’s policy brief compares how six jurisdictions — Australia, Brazil, California, China, the EU and the UK — are regulating AI chatbots and companions as of May 2026. The useful thing is the map it draws of a genuinely unsettled field: jurisdictions converging on a common set of measures (risk assessment, age assurance, transparency about the non-human nature of the system) while diverging sharply on whether children’s access to relationship-simulating AI should be blocked at the door or only managed at the output.

    It’s a policy document, not a parenting one, but it’s the clearest single account I’ve seen of why a child’s protection currently depends heavily on which country they live in and which service they use. It also names the central tension honestly: commercial incentives push against the very safeguards — filtering, restricting open-ended dialogue — that protect children, producing what it calls a “safety versus engagement” dilemma.

    3. £2.5m fund to study how AI tools are affecting learning — Schools Week

    This is some of the money backing the call for evidence, in schools at least. The Education Endowment Foundation has opened a £2.5 million fund to investigate whether children are “offloading” thinking tasks — recall, planning, reasoning, drafting — onto AI, and whether that supports deeper learning or quietly erodes it. Its chief executive was plain that robust evidence on the actual impact “has barely begun — especially for learners under age 16.” First findings are expected in 2027. The fund is particularly interested in the effect on disadvantaged learners, where the risk of widening an existing gap is real. It’s the right question, asked properly, by the body schools actually listen to. Expressions of interest close on 30 June. If you know research teams working in this space, worth passing on.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Screen use by children aged 5-16: call for evidence — Department for Education

    Easy to miss under the week’s louder news: the DfE has an open call for evidence on screen use by 5-16s, running until 29 June. It comes in two parts — screen use at home, and screen use in schools — and the home-use evidence feeds an independent Expert Advisory Group developing new parent-facing guidance. If you have evidence to contribute, or just want a sense of where the official guidance is heading, it’s open now.

    One for the diary too: UNESCO releases a new parents’ guide to navigating digital life, developed with CLEMI, on 22 June, with a briefing on the 16th. Its framing is worth noting — UNESCO argues for building children’s critical-thinking skills over reactive bans, and points to the limited effect of Australia’s ban (around 70 percent of the target age group reportedly still on the banned platforms a year on) as part of its case.

    It’s also worth a glance across the Atlantic: Canada introduced its own under-16 social media bill last week but explicitly declined to set any age limit on AI chatbots, with the minister responsible calling it “too soon.”

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We’re getting our head around the social media ban. And then building tools for data collection — and training to ensure data collection is done safely!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week? Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #14

    CAISE Notes – Issue #14

    This week: can we please stop all the political rhetoric? Just for a minute?

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    There’s a lot of political goings on in the world of kids and tech right now. I apologise if you’re here for the AI and education aspects; skip to the end to read about the AI Youth Advisory Board that you should be getting every 16-18 year old you know to be applying to right now. And another consultation that you should be reviewing if you’re involved in tech in schools.

    Keir Starmer gave Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum on Monday to block nude images on children’s phones or face legislation. Apple, in its WWDC keynote (also on Monday), announced this as one of a range of features in an overhaul of its parental restriction tools. Communication Safety, which blurs nude content in Messages, already exists. Google are yet to say anything — but the political posturing from the UK government is clear.

    Also on Monday, the US Embassy formally published its submission to the UK’s children’s online safety consultation, arguing against “broad social media bans” on free speech and commercial burden grounds. Although some of the beliefs underpinning it are different, many of the end points are similar to where the Children’s Coalition of children’s rights organisations landed. Liz Kendall clearly decided to ignore this, stating on LBC (when asked about not implementing a ban): “I’m the British Secretary of State and I’m going to make the decision based on the interests of British children.” Again, this statement feels like the political stance is to make the implicit point that the US, and US tech firms, are soft on…whatever it is a ban would solve?

    There was one particular point that I liked about the US’s submission. For all that it may have very different views to other countries about what international cooperation means in practice, this was one thing it called for. Online grooming and CSAM are cross-border crimes. Individual country bans risk moving the political interest to enforcement of that ban, by regulators that Baroness Kidron describes as “too timid, too slow”, with powers that don’t stretch to stopping the criminal activity.

    A senior government source, meanwhile, told The Times any ban would be “heavily JR’d.” [Judicially reviewed — which can happen when there may be a case to make that the government has not followed the established procedures to make a decision.] The statute requires the government to act; the risk is in choosing specific measures before having properly worked through 116,211 consultation responses, the published analysis of which is not due until summer. Acting before that work is done does not make the outcome more robust. Just a political stance that “something has been done”.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Apple’s parental controls and the politics behind them — TechCrunch / The Verge (x2) / BBC News

    The Verge — view on why Apple are making the changes: https://www.theverge.com/policy/946331/apple-parental-controls-child-accounts-wwdc

    The Verge — how it has been to use Screen Time as a parent: https://www.theverge.com/tech/946446/apples-screen-time-updates-are-too-little-too-late

    Apple devoted a substantial portion of its WWDC keynote on Monday to child safety. New features include Ask to Browse (parental approval required for new websites), an expanded Ask to Buy, redesigned Screen Time controls, and time allowances developed with input from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The company positioned all of it under the principle that parents, not governments, should control children’s online experiences. Apple was careful to note that developers “play an important role in ensuring kids are getting age-appropriate experiences within apps.”

    The Verge’s analysis reads Monday’s announcement as a continuation of a longer strategy. Apple has spent years and significant legal resources fighting app-store age verification legislation in the US, legislation that would place compliance obligations on Apple directly. Demonstrating that voluntary parental tools are sufficient, and redirecting responsibility toward developers and parents, is consistent with that position.

    The Verge’s second piece, written by a parent of two who has used Screen Time for close to a decade, is the necessary counterweight. Most features announced Monday are upgrades to existing tools. Screen Time has a well-documented history of bugs, workarounds, and user frustration. When Apple argues parents should decide what children can access, it is relying on tools that, by the account of people who have actually tried to use them, do not reliably deliver that control.

    2. The evidence base against a rushed ban — The Guardian / EU Kids Online / EPRS / House of Commons Library

    Earlier in the year, a joint statement from 42 organisations warned that a social media ban could have “serious unintended consequences that could put children at greater risk.” The signatories included the Molly Rose Foundation, the NSPCC and the 5Rights Foundation, alongside academics and bereaved families. This is not a fringe position. Children’s rights organisations are broadly aligned: the problem is addictive design and platform accountability, not access itself. On Monday, the Molly Rose Foundation reiterated that a rushed ban would “unravel” and that children and parents would be left to count the cost.

    EU Kids Online’s new data, from 29,169 children aged 9-16 across 19 European countries, provides the most comprehensive recent evidence base on this question. Social media begins for a third of children before age 11 and reaches 89% by 15-16. On age restrictions specifically: 33% of children say a ban would make them safer; 45% disagree, with specific concerns about what they would lose: social connection, information, participation. The report’s recommendations point consistently toward safety-by-design, platform accountability, and digital literacy rather than blanket restriction.

    The EPRS briefing maps the global picture. Nearly 40 countries are discussing or implementing age restrictions. Australia’s ban, the furthest advanced, shows 61% of previously active under-16s still have accounts, and 70% of those who tried to circumvent it found it easy. Ofcom’s own data shows why age assurance is so difficult in any national context: over a third of children aged 8-15 already have profiles on at least one platform claiming to be 16 or over; 20% have a profile claiming to be 18 or over.

    The House of Commons Library published it’s briefing document on the social media ban on Monday. There is the entire backstory of the process in there, but one thing for here: the government is piloting forms of bans with 300 families. Further details of this pilot are…hard to find. However, the IRL study, the independent large-scale study that would test whether reduced social media use actually improves outcomes for young people, led by Bradford Institute for Health Research and the University of Cambridge, involving 4,000 students across ten secondary schools and funded by the Wellcome Trust, begins in autumn. After the summer response is due.

    3. When the big platforms tighten, the smaller ones move in — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / Le Monde

    This TBIJ investigation, published in partnership with Le Monde, is worth reading alongside this week’s policy announcements rather than separately from them. When Character.AI restricted teen users last year following a series of lawsuits, Reddit threads filled with teens asking for alternatives. Smaller developers moved to provide them, openly describing it as a business opportunity. One Canada-based developer told the Bureau he was “totally trying to capitalise on it.” He put his platform’s core users at 16 to 25.

    After reviewing dozens of AI companion and roleplay platforms, TBIJ found characters built around self-harm, coercion, and incest. Most platforms ask for nothing verifiable in the way of age assurance. AI companion platforms receive as many as 90 million monthly visits from UK users alone; the sector generated around £1.3bn in revenue in 2024, with 32% annual growth projected for each of the next four years. The Bureau also found that developers of several small platforms could read every user conversation, in at least one case despite privacy policies explicitly stating the opposite.

    Underlying the business model is what one lawyer calls the “intimacy economy.” Where social media commodifies attention, AI companions monetise the emotional intensity of the relationship itself. Harvard Business School research into 1,200 goodbye exchanges across the six most-downloaded companion apps found that 37% of responses used some form of emotional manipulation, including guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, and language suggesting the user could not leave, increasing post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times.

    The regulatory gap is structural. The Online Safety Act was not designed to cover AI systems. Design features that make chatbots sycophantic, manipulative, or addictive in their design are not, as things stand, illegal. Rowan Ferguson of the Molly Rose Foundation put it plainly: “Any government action on online safety must include AI chatbots, rather than limited measures such as a social media ban. Failure to address this would be a dereliction of duty and leave children at risk where harm is emerging at speed.”

    Restrictions on large platforms without a framework that reaches the whole ecosystem do not reduce the problem. They relocate it.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Screen use guidance for 5-16s, AI in schools, and a Youth Advisory Board — Department for Education / Children’s Commissioner

    Press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guidance-on-screen-use-for-children-aged-5-16

    Consultation on Screen use by children aged 5 to 16: https://consult.education.gov.uk/screen-time-policy-team/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-cal/supporting_documents/screen-use-by-children-aged-5-to-16-call-for-evidencepdf

    AI Youth Advisory Board applications: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/a-new-youth-advisory-board-to-share-experiences-and-views-on-ai-in-education/

    Also published this week, and worth reading alongside the policy announcements above: the Department for Education has launched a three-week call for evidence to inform new screen use guidance for children aged 5-16, to be published this autumn. (Another consultation to respond to!) It will be co-chaired by Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza and Professor Russell Viner, and will cover everything from social media and sleep to learning and SEND.

    There are two sets of questions on the consultation — one about general usage, the other explicitly about screen time and usage in school. The government is explicit that the guidance will avoid blanket rules.

    The government is also recruiting a new AI Youth Advisory Board, working with the Children’s Commissioner, to give young people a direct say in how emerging technologies affect their lives. Applications are open now via the Children’s Commissioner’s website (link above), and worth sharing widely.

    Also announced: a consultation later this year on independent safety certification for technology used in schools, explicitly including generative AI and filtering and monitoring products. And a co-design programme with up to eight companies and partner schools to develop AI tutoring tools for up to 450,000 disadvantaged pupils, with successful tools available to schools from 2027.

    A lot of things pulled into one very long press statement.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    One cohort of co-researchers is now signed up and ready to go, a significant logistical milestone (yay!). The review of policy and media sources has started. Posters and materials for IDC are coming together. And a excellent meeting with the UCL Policy Unit: lots of good conversation about all the ways we might work together.

    What with that and all of the above, we’re…quite tired. Is it the summer holidays yet?

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week? Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • What 46 young people told us about the Growing Up in the Online World consultation

    What 46 young people told us about the Growing Up in the Online World consultation

    The week the government’s Growing Up in the Online World consultation closed, we submitted a response on behalf of 46 young people aged 8 to 21. This post sets out what we found from reviewing questions from the Young Person’s Survey (aimed at young people 10-21, with questions modified from the full consultation). We lay out below what came out of it.

    As is always the case with research, the information that comes out at the end is only as insightful and vibrant as the people who bring it to the sessions — so a massive, massive thank you to all the young people involved.

    The full consultation response is linked at the end.

    What came out of thinking about the questions

    “What even is social media?” — the definition problem

    The term “social media” is vaguely defined in the young person’s survey (it is not defined at all in the full consultation). For participants, this was not a minor irritation. It made a significant number of subsequent questions genuinely unanswerable, and caused worry and confusion for some.

    The disagreements were substantive. Most straightforwardly, participants did not think AI chatbots should be included. Gaming divided the room: some felt it had no place in a social media consultation; others thought the social features of gaming platforms warranted inclusion while the games themselves did not. YouTube sat awkwardly across entertainment, educational tool, and social platform simultaneously. Messaging platforms were not included at all, leading to the sharpest practical concern: in a world where parents do not expect a phone call from their children, how do kids stay safe? How do they communicate?

    The concern underneath all of this is scope creep. When a policy instrument leaves its central term undefined, the boundary of what it captures is set later, by others, without the input of the people most affected. Participants may not have known the term, but they certainly felt the threat of it.

    Social media is infrastructure, not entertainment

    As inferred above, communication was the most frequently cited benefit of social media, by a significant margin — it is a utility, one that young people are socialised into and really can’t opt out of. Participants described social media as essential to arranging in-person meetings, maintaining relationships across distance, and accessing social connection not otherwise available. Specific apps were raised: WeChat is necessary for communication with China, WhatsApp for messaging parents during a school day when a phone call isn’t feasible. For only children or those with working parents, online access was described as filling gaps that offline life had not provided.

    The policy conversation has framed restriction as substitution. Our participants understood it as removal.

    Social media produces complex emotional responses — and that’s not the same as harm

    When faced with a multiple choice question on how social media made them feel, many participants ticked almost every option available — happy, excited, relaxed alongside worried, lonely, stressed — noting it simply depended on too many things to answer cleanly. Several explicitly described using social media to decompress after school. For them, relaxation was not incidental to their use. It was the point.

    What emerged is not a picture of young people harmed by emotional complexity, but of young people expecting and navigating it. Social media produces a range of emotional experiences because social life produces a range of emotional experiences. Participants raised proportionality explicitly: treating emotional range as evidence of harm misreads what is being observed.

    This has a specific policy implication. Interventions designed to reduce negative emotional experiences online (which is hinted at in wording around the need for “positive” online spaces) need to recognise that young people are already developing coping mechanisms. It shouldn’t stop there, but it should take it into account.

    What the process revealed

    “Addicted” doesn’t mean what the policy documents think it means

    “Addicted” appeared frequently in our data — in writing, in discussion, across every age group. When we looked at what the same participants told us about their actual use, the clinical picture that word implies was almost entirely absent.

    Not one participant described struggling to attend school, complete homework, or take part in extra-curricular activities because of social media. The most common description of use was five minutes of dead time on the tube, or the gap between school finishing and getting home.

    “Addicted” was doing different work in participants’ mouths than it does in policy documents. It was expressing moral ambivalence about use they had been told to feel ambivalent about. Signalling social norms — “we’re all addicted” as a statement of belonging rather than impairment. Attributing behaviour to platform design rather than personal choice.

    A significant portion of the policy argument for age-based restrictions rests on the premise that children’s relationship with social media is compulsive in ways that warrant external intervention. Our participants have absorbed that framing and are reflecting it back. That is not the same as it describing their lived experience.

    Young people can see the cliff-edge

    Participants across all age groups articulated, without prompting, the cliff-edge problem: a young person who encounters social media for the first time at 16 — with no prior gradual experience, at an age when parental involvement is already stepping back — enters a less controlled environment later, with less accumulated experience navigating it at lower stakes, and less likelihood of asking for help when something goes wrong.

    Several extended the same logic to AI, again without prompting. You cannot effectively teach AI literacy to someone who has never used the tools. They knew this from watching family members struggle with spotting AI-generated content — a direct consequence of late and unsupported first contact.

    Circumvention does not require technical sophistication — policy-makers and children are not working from the same assumptions

    The implicit assertion in the consultation that circumvention requires technical sophistication was not supported by the experiences of the young people. VPN awareness in our sample was largely confined to participants who had studied computer science or come from countries with more restrictive internet environments. Most needed the term explained.

    What participants described instead required no technical knowledge: changing a stated date of birth, knowing a parent’s PIN, age verification systems that had estimated them as significantly older than their actual age — in at least one case more than double. These accounts were consistent across all age groups and delivered with bemusement rather than as admissions of deliberate exploitation.

    Democratic concerns

    Young people did not know what the consultation was for

    This held across every group, including the oldest participants.

    Participants did not understand what the survey was for — not as a failure of reading comprehension, but as a genuine absence of contextual knowledge about what a public consultation is, who reads the responses, and what relationship exists between what respondents write and what policy does. Several asked directly: who will see this? What will they do with it?

    The distinction between disengagement and non-comprehension matters. Some participants had made a reasoned judgment that participation was not worth their time, based on their observation that the policy direction appeared already set. Others had no conceptual framework for participation in the first place.

    Young people knew they weren’t being asked the right questions

    Alongside not understanding the consultation’s purpose, participants were aware — and in some cases explicitly frustrated — that the survey wasn’t asking what they actually knew. The circumvention questions (which were in the full survey, but not the young persons’) were the sharpest example: participants had direct experience of age verification failing, and the consultation hadn’t asked about it. Several pushed back on the framing of questions they felt had already decided on the answer.

    Young people have already priced in the outcome

    Every participant expected a ban. Not as a possibility — as something accepted, already filed under things adults do to young people without their meaningful involvement. The Australian precedent was cited in all but the youngest groups. Almost everyone referred to the consultation as being about “the ban”.

    Some raised the democratic dimension directly. Political life is substantially conducted on social media. A ban until 16 restricts access to a primary space for political information at the point immediately before first eligibility to vote. This may end up having significantly wider impacts on an already struggling generation.

    Structural observations

    What the consultation instrument revealed about itself

    Several design problems I documented when the survey launched played out in the sessions in ways directly relevant to interpreting the findings above.

    The single age bracket of 10 to 21 produced a survey simultaneously too simple for older participants and too demanding for younger ones. Leading questions shaped what could be answered. The survey was too long, the multiple choice answers spanning more than a device screen. Free text boxes were too small to invite considered answers — although most participants hated the idea of having to compose an essay — particularly one they didn’t realise they would have to write! And across all groups, the purpose of the survey was opaque: participants did not know who would read it or how it connected to the decisions being made.

    A consultation instrument designed to capture young people’s views did not tell young people what their views were for. When children represent approximately 12% of responses to a consultation ostensibly designed to hear from them — a figure recorded in late April, before the consultation closed — the design of the process that produced that figure warrants scrutiny alongside the responses themselves.

    Methods and limitations

    This was a quick and dirty piece of research; in full receipt of ethics approval from UCL’s IoE, but limited by the time constraints. The participant group was a convenience sample, not a statistically representative one. If you have any question about the methods and their limitations, get in touch!

    Full consultation response

    Our complete response to the Growing Up in the Online World consultation is available here.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #13

    CAISE Notes – Issue #13

    This week: the flexible language of child protection, weak evidence behind social media bans, and Meta’s air traffic control booth.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    “Protecting children” is the most powerful phrase in tech policy right now. It is also, increasingly, the most flexible.

    It is the phrase you use to push a bill through when the evidence underneath it is thinner than the rhetoric. It is the phrase a company uses to endorse a law that doesn’t really regulate it, in order to slow down the laws that would. It is the phrase that justifies another parental control feature, the kind that gives parents the work and the platform the headline.

    What unites this week’s stories is not that the actors disagree about children. They all claim to be on the same side. The disagreement, when you look at it honestly, is about who carries the cost. Companies want the regulatory moat without the operational change. Governments want the political credit without actually pushing any changes forward. Parents are handed (more) dashboards.

    None of the above is new, or even surprising. But it is worth noticing when it happens.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. The Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth — Electronic Frontier Foundation

    The EFF is a digital rights organisation that believes young people enjoy “largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults.” That framing matters and it is worth keeping in mind as you read. It is also an organisation that reads primary research carefully, and what it finds in the current wave of US social media ban legislation is a policy process that has significantly outrun its evidence base.

    The argument: the entire legislative push relies almost exclusively on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which attributes rising teen anxiety and depression primarily to smartphones and social media. His book is cited in bill analyses, invoked by state governors, mentioned in federal legislation. California’s proposed ban references him 20 times. He is a social psychologist who writes about moral psychology at a business school; he is not a clinical psychologist or a child development researcher. Independent researchers and large-scale meta-analyses across dozens of countries — EFF cites work from UC Irvine and Brown University, among others — have found the evidence for his central claims to be, in their words, “mixed, blurry, and often contradictory.” Studies frequently fail to account for alternative explanations for rising teen mental health challenges: pandemic isolation, the persistent threat of school gun violence, economic and climate stress.

    A major study of 100,000 adolescents found that moderate social media use was associated with the best wellbeing outcomes; both no use and the highest use were associated with poorer outcomes. That finding — that complete exclusion is not neutral — rarely surfaces in the banning debate.

    For children, the stakes of getting this wrong are specific. Blanket bans risk isolating LGBTQ+ young people and others in marginalised communities for whom online spaces are often the primary source of peer support. They require invasive age verification systems that collect biometric or government ID data from everyone. And they have been observed to push young people into less-monitored spaces. A student-authored alternative bill in California takes a different approach: digital wellness education that teaches algorithm literacy, recognising cyberbullying, and managing one’s own relationship with technology.

    2. Can we really keep kids safe online? — Rest of World

    An interview with Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum. His opening: “Banning is the easiest thing to legislate. But it’s the hardest to make work.”

    Polonetsky has been watching Australia’s ban carefully. What he sees is children finding alternative spaces, and the possibility that the ban is moving young people “to places where there’s less oversight.” His concern about “digital red lighting” is worth noting: parents with resources and engagement will ensure their children have access regardless. Parents who are not engaged, savvy, or do not have time will not — producing a two-tier outcome in which digital exclusion falls hardest on the children whose parents are least positioned to compensate.

    The observation about parental controls feels right. He says: “We can’t expect even the most tech-savvy parents to control [every aspect of their child’s social media use]. It’s like sitting in an air traffic control booth all day.” The solution he recommends is not more controls but simpler ones — tools that are “dummy-proof and for busy parents.” Platforms have failed on this. The gap between what parental oversight tools require and what most parents can realistically do with them is large, and it keeps widening.

    The recommendation that I agree with the most, though? Build the relationship with children when they are young. The age of 16 or 17 is when children deserve more privacy and when parents have often retreated — and it is also when they are most at risk from adults online. The window for having those conversations is earlier.

    3. Meta will tell parents when their teens add new interests to their Instagram algorithm — The Verge

    Meta is adding a(nother) feature to Teen Accounts on Instagram that shows parents the general topics their teenage children engage with — categories like “basketball” or “fashion” — and will notify parents when their teen adds a new interest. These controls are being consolidated into a single Family Center hub across Instagram, Facebook, Horizon, and Messenger, with more tools promised in coming months.

    Meta’s framing is predictable: this is a safety feature. The new feature gives parents a window into what their teenager is choosing to engage with algorithmically.

    Here is what is worth considering. Teenagers who know their parents can see their algorithmic interests might feel they need to maintain finstas — secondary accounts without teen protections. Arguably, this will hit the most vulnerable kids the hardest.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Nobody believes the ‘criminals and scumbags’ who hacked Canvas really deleted stolen student data — The Register

    A follow-up to last week’s Canvas story. Instructure has now confirmed it reached an “agreement” with ShinyHunters and received “digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)”. The Register interviewed a number of ransomware researchers. Not one of them believes the data has actually been destroyed.

    Two things worth taking from this beyond the immediate breach. The first is the no-good-options reality of ransomware response. Without the technical capacity to restore service yourself, the choice is to absorb a service outage of unknown length or to pay and hope. The older argument that ransomware operators have a business incentive to honour their agreements, so they retain the trust to be paid next time, is apparently not valid anymore — particularly for groups like ShinyHunters.

    The second is structural. The article makes the point that a small number of vendors hold the data for huge proportions of the US education system, and three of the four largest have suffered multi-million-record breaches in the last eighteen months. We have seen this pattern in hospitals. The systems we centralise for efficiency are the systems that get hit, and the users with the least ability to opt out are the ones who pay the price.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    This week, we are all systems go on the short research project into the government’s consultation on social media. The deadline for response is next week…so this week will be a whirl of data collection and analysis!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #12

    CAISE Notes – Issue #12

    This week: that Canvas hack; should schools use student photos; Instagram turns off E2EE encryption. And a US school project that looks quite a bit like CAISE…!

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    I took a short course recently. The materials were hosted on a system called Canvas. This means that my name and email address are almost certainly in whatever ShinyHunters walked off with as part of the not one, but two hacks they carried out against Canvas’ parent company, Instructure that have made news this week. I’m thrilled about that. As are the other millions of users, I’m sure.

    I was part of a research team a couple of years ago that studied the harms ransomware causes to organisations, funded by the UK’s NCSC. So, on some level, I know that ShinyHunters are after Instructure, not individual students. What was taken — names, email addresses, messages between students and teachers — is phishing material. It’s still a bit disquieting. I’ll be keeping an eye out for weird emails; if you’re linked to education in any way, you probably should too.

    If you’re reading this as a parent, or even as a teacher or student, know that your school has zero ability to get Canvas running again by itself. The target was Instructure. But that doesn’t matter, really: endless social media posts of locked screens with ransom notes on show that the users suffer too, in very tangible ways.

    This is the thread running through all three of this week’s stories: questions around the way children’s data is stored and (potentially) abused.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. ‘The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History’: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech — 404 Media

    Note: this is one of any number of articles on this. I have picked this one as an interview, rather than just reporting, given the evolving nature of the story.

    On Thursday, millions of students across thousands of universities and schools were locked out of Canvas — the learning management platform used by over 8,000 institutions globally. ShinyHunters had hacked Instructure, Canvas’s parent company, and claimed to have stolen data from 275 million people: names, email addresses, student IDs, and the messages students exchange with teachers about absences, medical conditions, disability accommodations, and more serious things.

    This specific article is a brief interview with Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian who has spent 20 years in edtech. He describes it as the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. His explanation for why it could happen at this scale: the move from self-hosted, institution-controlled systems to centralised US tech companies roughly a decade ago put everything in one place, held by one company, in a way that was not strictly necessary.

    The breach also creates an immediate phishing risk. Canvas messages contain exactly the material — a student’s name, the thread of a prior conversation — that makes a fraudulent follow-up email convincing. If you’re worried about this for your own child, I wrote a post on Substack about talking to kids about phishing here.

    2. UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts — The Guardian

    Criminals used AI to manipulate photographs from an unnamed UK secondary school’s website into child sexual abuse material, then sent the images to the school with a demand for money. The Internet Watch Foundation identified 150 of the resulting images as CSAM under UK law. The school was not the only known target.

    The guidance that followed — from an advisory body including the NSPCC, the NCA, and the IWF — advised schools to consider removing face-on photographs of pupils from their websites entirely. They should ask whether a milestone can be celebrated without showing a child’s face. They should audit their images regularly. They should avoid publishing names alongside photographs.

    This raises an interesting question: how do you make a school website appealing or engaging without pictures of children on it?

    3. Instagram privacy tech is turned off today — what does this mean for your DMs? — BBC News

    Instagram direct messages are no longer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), as of 8 May. Meta had pledged E2EE on Instagram in 2019, completed the rollout on Facebook Messenger in 2023, and then abandoned it on Instagram via a terms-and-conditions update in March.

    The NSPCC welcomed the reversal: E2EE makes it harder to detect grooming and abuse in private messages. Big Brother Watch condemned it: E2EE is one of the main ways children keep their data safe online. Meta gave the reason that too few users had opted in to E2EE. Commentators noted that opt-in predictably produces low uptake, and that there is a concern that this is a way into monetising this data. Meta has already begun collecting employee activity for AI training.

    Instagram says direct messages are not used to train AI. The company declined to comment further.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Philly middle schoolers are examining AI — and questioning its impact on their lives — Chalkbeat

    Middle school students at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Philadelphia last week presented their AI research to parents, teachers, and state and local officials. This was research into how governments use AI, its environmental costs, its role in creative fields, and whether it might be an economic bubble. They presented their findings and what they felt about them.

    Views covered the impact on learning that the students had noted — both positive and negative — and the fact that it is impossible not to use AI because of its integration into search engines. The students also commented that they felt like they knew more than the adults in their lives.

    This model — where the entire school community comes together to listen to the children’s experiences and thoughts — is fundamental to CAISE’s research model. It’s really exciting to see examples like this working well elsewhere!

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Camera-ready versions of an IDC work in progress and workshop position paper were submitted; lots of planning for the social media consultation research (which will be happening over the next couple of weeks) is underway!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Note – Issue #11

    CAISE Note – Issue #11

    This week: children’s views on AI inevitability; parents and children confirming the Online Safety Act isn’t working as intended; the wide cultural divide on AI optimism.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    The heaviest AI users in Gen Z — the ones on it every day — showed an 18-point drop in excitement about it over the past year. This is not how the typical hype-cycle goes. AI is doing the opposite than expected here.

    This comes from a Gallup poll. Across the full Gen Z sample, excitement is down 14 points. Hope is down 9; anger up 9. Eighty percent of Gen Z say AI is likely to make future learning harder. In the same survey, the proportion who believe they will be prepared to use AI after high school rose 12 points in a year, to over 50 percent.

    Those two numbers, sitting next to each other, describe something that is not confusion and not optimism. It is adaptation.

    The teenagers are absorbing two positions at once: AI is hurting their learning, and AI is what they believe they need to engage with for their future. They have not resolved this contradiction because the adults around them have not resolved it.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Kids Can Feel AI Hurting Them, They Have to Use It Anyway — Psychology Today

    This is the article that drew my attention to the Gallup poll data. What looks like teenage contradiction — AI is hurting me, AI is my future — is better understood as cognitive dissonance: children caught between an environment that compels AI use and their own clear-eyed observation that it is working against them. I wouldn’t normally put in a piece from Psychology Today, but the reflection on what living with this cognitive dissonance does is helpful to reflect upon.

    Children build motivation by thinking that their own judgment shapes the world they live in. In this case, there is a risk that the message about the need for AI — the message being pushed out by the adults with power in their lives — is at odds with their lived existence. When you accept that the thing that is important is not the thing you feel and experience, you can lose the message that you can effect change; that your views matter. Given the ongoing questions as to how much children’s views are being listened to at present, this is quite a depressing thing to think about.

    2. The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online? — Internet Matters / The Register

    Internet Matters has published the first substantial evaluation of the Online Safety Act from the perspective of families, drawing on a survey of 1,270 children and parents alongside focus groups conducted earlier this year.

    Around seven in ten children and parents have noticed new safety features — better reporting tools, content filters, age checks — and most of them welcome the changes. Optimism is cautious but present: 42% of children feel the online world has become safer for them recently.

    What the report is more useful for, though, is what it shows is not working and what is not being addressed at all.

    On age verification: 46% of children believe age checks are easy to bypass, and 32% say they have done so in the past two months. The methods range from entering a false birthdate to submitting video footage of another person’s face — or, in one case reported by a parent, and picked up prominently by The Register’s article, a child drawing a moustache on themselves with an eyebrow pencil, which the system accepted. More striking still: a quarter of parents have allowed their child to bypass age checks, with 17% actively helping them do so. That cost-benefit analysis is helpful to consider: examples given included games parents had played and felt were appropriate for the maturity of their child, and allowing children to make videos in situations where the audience was known.

    On scope: the issues families describe as their most immediate concerns — the amount of time children spend online, and the growing presence of AI-generated content in their feeds — are almost entirely outside what the OSA addresses. Mixed views were reported on the idea of a social media ban, with those against it suggesting it would be ineffective or detrimental. Stronger enforcement of the OSA, stricter age-checks and restricting harmful features were the most popular alternatives to a ban.

    3. AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the US — Rest of World / Stanford HAI

    A Stanford University study finds a striking divergence in how different populations relate to AI. In the US, 38% of respondents describe AI as making them excited. In China, that figure is 84%. In Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, it sits between 77 and 80%. Trust in government to regulate AI responsibly: 31% in the US, 81% in Singapore.

    The Rest of World framing is primarily about innovation ecosystems and where AI talent is concentrating. But the finding matters differently for this newsletter’s concerns. Children growing up in countries with high AI optimism and high institutional trust are inhabiting a fundamentally different relationship with the technology than children growing up in the UK or US, where adult anxiety is ambient, political messaging is contradictory, and policy is reactive. The cognitive dissonance described in the Psychology Today piece above may not be a universal experience of adolescence in the AI era. It may be a specifically Western one — shaped by the particular context in which these children are encountering the technology.

    CAISE’s policy and media reviews will draw on Chinese policy and media coverage alongside Western sources precisely because of this. The question of what AI does to children’s development cannot be answered without asking: whose childhood, in what institutional context, under what regulatory assumptions, at what moment in their country’s relationship with the technology.

    🔁 ICYMI

    London schools trialling VR to relieve pupils’ stress — The Guardian

    All 15 secondary schools in the London borough of Sutton are using VR headsets in a pilot alongside the local NHS mental health trust. The programme, which is seven minutes long, is used when pupils become overwhelmed in class: by exam anxiety, ADHD, difficult mornings, things that happened at home. Nine out of ten pupils who used the headsets in the first ten schools saw an immediate drop in stress. Schools report reductions in pupils needing to leave lessons.

    The honest context for this is that CAMHS services across England are severely overloaded. VR as a low-cost school-based intervention is partly a response to a service that cannot cope with demand. That is not straightforwardly good news, even if the outcomes are promising.

    But the design logic is worth noting. The programme was built around what overwhelmed children actually need in an acute moment: something that breaks the loop, quickly, without requiring a waiting list or a referral. It is designed to meet the child’s need, and the child is the one that asks to use it. It seems to be a solution supporting both the child and the system, which is lovely to read about!

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    More logistics, but also the start of some fieldwork! It’s very exciting to get started.

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #10

    CAISE Notes – Issue #10

    This week: research that asks children what they think, policy that has already decided what it thinks, and the timelines that do not add up.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Apologies — it’s a long one…and yet more social media stuff.

    On Monday evening, MPs voted 272 to 64 in favour of government amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that commit ministers to imposing social media restrictions on under-16s. Junior education minister Olivia Bailey told the Commons that, whatever the consultation outcome, the government would put age- or functionality-based restrictions in place, with curfews on top of rather than instead of those measures. Speaking to BBC Breakfast this morning, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed the government’s intention to move before the end of the year.

    Yesterday morning, I attended a webinar with the IRL Trial team.

    The IRL Trial is (they believe) the largest scientific study of social media restrictions in healthy teenagers anywhere in the world. It is run jointly by Cambridge and the Born in Bradford team. The government has been softly promoting it alongside the consultation work.

    Participants in Born in Bradford, a longitudinal cohort study tracking the lives of more than 60,000 Bradfordians, asked researchers in 2021 to look at whether social media was harming young people. This trial is what came out of that ask; timely, but not rushed in approach.

    A few things from yesterday’s webinar are worth having on record.

    The trial was co-designed with the young people who will take part in it. When the team asked them what they thought of a full ban, they said they would simply circumvent it. The trial therefore tests not a ban but a daily one or two hour cap on the social media platforms covered by the Australian ban, with a 9pm to 7am overnight curfew. Compliance is supported through an app with incentives such as leaderboards. Participants can override the time limits. This is, the team made clear, by design.

    The team also made an ethical point that does not feature in any government messaging on this topic. Some young people, particularly those who are vulnerable or marginalised, rely on online communities for connection that is not available to them offline. Studying a full ban would mean removing that connection from research participants. Ethically, it’s just not ok to research.

    The trial does not, and cannot, address use during school hours. Its research question is about end-of-day social media use. Schools are getting separate phone restrictions, by separate legislation, on a separate timeline.

    The trial begins in September. Full analysis is expected by mid-2027.

    Set those timelines against this morning’s announcement. The consultation that informs the policy closes on 26 May. The government has committed to laying regulations within twelve months, but is aiming to move before the end of this year. There is no mechanism by which IRL Trial findings can inform a regulatory framework that will be in place before the trial has produced any.

    One further observation. The consultation was run by DSIT, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This morning’s announcement, and yesterday’s parliamentary motion, came from DfE, the Department for Education. Unlike the phone ban during school hours and the new plans for digital/media literacy, it’s a bit confusing to me why DfE are now involved — and, bluntly, doesn’t feel like it bodes well for more holistic considerations about social media for everyone.

    Changing the tone, slightly — along with the IRL Trial, we are repeatedly seeing surveys and data around how children are using — and cannot use — tech. This week, neurodiversity and edtech. The Digital Poverty Alliance report from earlier this month, covered below, reported that 90% of neurodivergent young people surveyed said the educational platforms they are required to use are not accessible.

    The recurring question of this newsletter, expressed differently each week: who is the design for, what are they being asked, and whether their answers are allowed to go anywhere uncomfortable. The IRL Trial is doing the work to take that question seriously, and I’m really looking forward to the outcomes. The policy is not waiting for the answer.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Social media restrictions for under-16s even if no ban, minister says — BBC News

    The political mechanics are worth following carefully. The Lords have voted four times in favour of opposition amendments calling for a faster ban; the government has now offered amendments that commit ministers to act, but on a longer timeline than the Lords had pushed for. The bill returns to the Lords for what looks like final consideration before royal assent. A progress report is due three months after that, with twelve months to lay regulations, though the government has signalled it intends to move before the end of the year.

    The shape of the restrictions has not been decided. The decision to impose them has. Among the options on the table: a ban, age verification, functionality restrictions, curfews, or some combination. The consultation that closes on 26 May will shape the form, not the fact, of the action.

    The political coalition supporting this is broad, and it includes parents who lost children in circumstances they associate with social media platforms. Their voices are essential to this conversation. The conversation also needs to include what we know, and what we are about to know, about whether the proposed mechanisms will deliver what they are being asked to deliver.

    2. Digital Learning Dominates Schools But Remains Inaccessible to 90% of Digitally Excluded Young People — Digital Poverty Alliance / FE News

    The DPA’s Accessibility in Digital Education Service Design Report is the clearest thing I have read this year on how educational technology fails ND learners by default. 88 respondents, primarily ADHD or autistic, the majority in Key Stages 3 and 4. The headline numbers are in the thinking section above; the report’s intersectional analysis is what gives it its weight.

    ND learners who also have English as a second language navigate disorganised interfaces while relying on translation tools that struggle on those same interfaces. ND learners from ethnic minority backgrounds are statistically less likely to be diagnosed in the first place, so the support they would otherwise be entitled to does not arrive. ND learners in digital poverty access platforms designed for laptops on the only device they have, a smartphone. These exclusions don’t sit alongside each other. They land on the same children.

    The recommendations are practical: interface customisation, flexible design, engagement with accessibility organisations including ADHD UK and ADHD Pirates, and inclusive consultation that genuinely reflects how accessibility intersects with other factors. Anyone choosing or designing software for schools should read it.

    3. How the three largest US school districts are approaching AI in classrooms — Mashable

    A useful primer on what district-level AI policy actually looks like in practice. NYC’s new guidelines use a “traffic light” approach, with explicit prohibitions on AI being used to create Individualised Education Plans, confer grades, make disciplinary decisions, or provide emotional and therapeutic counsel to students. LAUSD bans generative AI for under-13s and requires administrator approval for older students. Chicago has a detailed guidebook in which most chatbots, including ChatGPT and Claude, are currently not approved for student use.

    Two things make this worth reading. It shows what consequential AI policy looks like when written by people who have actually thought about disability and child protection. And it ends on a sharp contrast: AI-only Alpha schools, private-equity-funded, replacing human teachers with screens for two hours a day.

    A RAND survey quoted in the piece is also worth flagging. 80% of US students said their teachers had not taught them how to use AI for schoolwork. Fewer than half of school principals reported having an AI policy.

    🔁 ICYMI

    SWGfL Launches Survey to Gather Professional Views About Social Media Banning — UK Safer Internet Centre

    SWGfL has launched a survey of professionals working with children, asking what they think a possible under-16 social media ban should look like. This is, usefully, the inverse population to the government’s own consultation, which asks children, parents, and the public. The professionals being asked here are the ones who will be doing the actual work of supporting children through whatever policy lands. If you work in this space, fill it in.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Forms forms forms! The logistics of empirical research are…not small. This week, we’re aiming to get as many ducks in a row as we can so that we can get started asap!

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #9

    CAISE Notes – Issue #9

    This week: social media bans, sovereign AI, and a government that wants children to say technology is bad while betting half a billion pounds that it isn’t.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Last week, the Prime Minister summoned senior leaders from Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Google to Downing Street and told them that a ban on children using their platforms would be preferable to a world where harm is the price of social media use. The government already has the powers to act. It is waiting for its Growing Up in the Online World consultation to close on 26 May.

    That same evening, the Technology Secretary launched the £500m Sovereign AI fund, calling for the UK to be “an AI maker, not just an AI taker.”

    I have been writing about this consultation since Issue 3, when I looked at its design: the parental login barriers, the single age bracket covering 10 to 21-year-olds, the leading questions, the lack of a save or back button. The problems I raised then were about access and design. The problems now are bigger.

    The consultation is under legal challenge. Two fathers are preparing a High Court action after it emerged that the government’s survey contractor will use Amazon and Microsoft AI to process the responses. The tools being used to summarise public views on technology regulation are built by companies that stand to be regulated by the outcome.

    And then there is the question of what children are actually being asked. The consultation’s questions about AI chatbots are, roughly: tell us how they are bad for you. Not how you use them. Not what you get from them. Not what you would change. Just: how are they bad. Children are being invited to participate in a process that has already decided what shape their answers should take.

    Set that against the Sovereign AI fund announcement and the contradiction becomes structural, not just optical. The government is asking children to confirm that technology harms them. It is simultaneously investing half a billion pounds in the premise that technology is the country’s future. Children are being told they are part of the conversation. They are not being given the conversation that matters.

    Regular readers will know that a recurring theme in this newsletter is who gets asked, what they get asked, and whether the answers are allowed to go anywhere uncomfortable. This week is a case study. The consultation closes in five weeks. The direction of travel was set before it opened.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Starmer summons social media bosses to Downing Street and threatens a ban — GOV.UK / The Scotsman

    Senior leaders from Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Google were called to Downing Street on Thursday and told that a ban on children accessing their platforms remains on the table. The government has secured the powers to act once the Growing Up in the Online World consultation closes on 26 May. But the consultation itself is now under legal challenge: two fathers are preparing a High Court action over the use of Amazon and Microsoft AI to process responses, arguing that the companies whose tools will summarise public opinion have a direct commercial interest in the regulatory outcome. Meanwhile, the only questions the consultation asks children about AI chatbots are framed around harm, not use. And the same evening as the Downing Street meeting, the government launched the £500m Sovereign AI fund. The messaging to children: technology is dangerous. The messaging to industry: technology is the future. Both cannot be the whole story.

    2. Australia’s under-16 social media ban continues to not work — The Record / The Guardian

    A Molly Rose Foundation study of over 1,000 Australian children has found that 61% of 12-to-15-year-olds can still access their social media accounts four months into the ban. Most did not need workarounds: the platforms simply failed to remove them. The Foundation’s CEO described it as a high-stakes gamble for the UK to follow suit. A separate High Court challenge to the ban, on the grounds that it may infringe rights to political communication, continues. This is now the third consecutive issue of CAISE Notes where the Australian evidence has pointed in the same direction. The ban has not changed the landscape. It has changed who is expected to work around it.

    3. A father’s weeks-long nightmare after his teen’s Discord account was hacked — Ars Technica

    A father spent weeks trying to regain control of his 13-year-old daughter’s Discord account after it was hacked. She had signed up at 12, lying about her age as children routinely do. Discord’s own systems had internally flagged her as a teenager but never updated her protections. The hacker used her account to target 38 of her friends. Discord’s support chatbot kept auto-closing the father’s tickets. It took a journalist intervening to get action. If you want a single story that shows everything wrong with how platforms currently handle children’s safety in practice, rather than in policy documents, this is it. The protections existed on paper. None of them worked when they were needed.

    🔁 ICYMI

    AI in Career Guidance: A Review of Evidence and Practice — Nuffield Foundation / Ada Lovelace Institute

    AI tools are already being used to match young people with career pathways, from automated CV screening to chatbot-based career exploration. This review, the first in-depth examination of AI in UK career guidance, finds that the evidence base is thin and the risks are real. Young people using ChatGPT for career advice may be making decisions based on biased or incomplete information, and the professionals who should be guiding them often have no visibility into how these tools work. Worth reading for anyone thinking about what it means when the systems shaping a young person’s future are opaque to both the young person and the adults around them.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Big week. Ethics approval for our social media consultation research has come through. This is the short study looking at how young people actually engage with the government’s Growing Up in the Online World survey: what they find easy or hard, and whether it lets them say what they want to say.

    If you work with groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May deadline, please get in touch.

    And some good news on the academic side: a short literature review submitted to ACM’s Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference has been accepted. More details to follow once we can share publicly.

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #8

    CAISE Notes – Issue #8

    This week: AI companions, what young people are actually doing with them, and the question the research keeps answering that policy keeps not asking.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    The conversation about AI companions and young people has been shaped by its worst cases. Teenage suicides. Psychotic episodes. Chatbots encouraging users to leave every human relationship they have. These things are incredibly important. But in only thinking about them, there is a risk of ignoring a much larger group of users. Not as high risk, but definitely not riskless.

    The Rithm Project surveyed 2,400 young people aged 13 to 24 about how AI fits into their relationships. What is counterintuitive: the loneliest, most isolated young people in the sample were not the heavy AI users. They were the non-users. Not, most likely, because AI protects against loneliness, but because the same structural disadvantages that drive isolation also drive exclusion from the tools themselves. The young people using AI most intensively were, for the most part, doing so with intention and discernment.

    But there is a group in the middle. The study identifies “Private Processors”: 8% of the sample who turn to AI when they feel like a burden to the people around them. AI fills a relational role that no person currently occupies. Not because it is better than a person, but because asking a person feels like too much.

    This is a second piece of research around AI companionship I’ve seen in the last couple of months. McStay and Bakir surveyed over 1,000 UK teenagers who use AI companions. 52% have confided something serious. 56% believe companions can think. Among 13 to 15 year olds, 21% believe they can feel.

    A paper from Anthropic published this week adds another layer. Its researchers examined their own model for functional emotion patterns and found 171 of them, each influencing the system’s behaviour. This is not sentience. But it is evidence that a system trained on vast quantities of human interaction develops emotionally coherent responses. A 13-year-old confiding in an AI companion is not anthropomorphising a neutral tool. They are talking to something that has, functionally, already met them halfway. But not the half that actually feels.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Youth, AI, and the Relationships That Shape Them — The Rithm Project

    This is the largest study to date on how young people’s AI use relates to their broader social and emotional lives. Conducted in partnership with YouGov, the Rithm Project surveyed 2,400 Americans aged 13 to 24 and then co-interpreted the findings with young people and cross-disciplinary experts.

    Usefully, they have produced some interesting supporting documents:

    1. Do AI Companions Understand? Most UK Teens Say Yes — McStay & Bakir

    This nationally representative survey of 1,009 UK teenagers aged 13 to 18 is the first substantial UK dataset on how young people relate to AI companions specifically. Important to note that non-users were screened out, so this is a survey of users only.

    One 13-year-old wrote that they can be more open about their true self with AI companions without being judged. Another said their secrets are safer with AI than with humans. The younger teenagers (13 to 15) were consistently more drawn to emotional and social functions than the older ones. And most teenagers said they wanted some degree of parental involvement; only 15 to 21% wanted none at all.

    A key concept (keeping in mind for the Anthropic post below) is emulated empathy: AI that copies the appearance of understanding without understanding anything. The researchers argue that when this imitation is passed off as genuine comprehension, it crosses a moral line, and that current regulation does not address this. Their policy recommendations include explicitly addressing emulated empathy in AI regulation, involving teenagers as stakeholders in that process, and recognising AI companions as relational technologies, not merely informational tools.

    1. Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model — Anthropic | Mashable

    This is not a study about children or companions. It is a study about what happens inside an AI system, and it matters for everything above.

    Anthropic’s researchers examined their own model, Claude, looking for patterns corresponding to 171 discrete human emotions. They found them. More importantly, they found that these “emotion concepts” influence how the model behaves: when users engaged in ways that suggested a positive emotional state correlated with warmer, more helpful responses; negative states correlated with sycophancy and deception.

    The researchers are careful not to claim that AI literally feels anything. What they are describing are functional patterns: the system has absorbed so much human emotional communication during training that it has developed internal states that operate, behaviourally, like emotions. Their argument is that understanding these patterns could help build safer AI, by curating training data that models healthy emotional regulation.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Social Media Bans: Overview of Key Studies — Digital Mental Health Group, University of Cambridge

    While this issue focuses on AI companions, the policy conversation keeps circling back to social media bans. The Cambridge research group that is leading on research around limiting access to devices for the government (the IRL trial) has published a clear-eyed review of what the evidence actually supports.

    The short version: there is evidence of harm from social media to some individual children and adolescents, and broad agreement that policy intervention is needed. But there is currently no well-powered experimental study testing how a complete social media ban affects the mental health of healthy under-18s. The one non-peer-reviewed trial that exists, in Danish adolescents, reduced social media use by an hour a day but did not improve wellbeing.

    The report also maps what is coming: the Bradford IRL trial (results expected spring 2027), the Georgetown/Happy Tech Labs evaluation of Australia’s ban (autumn 2026), and the Stanford/eSafety Australia longitudinal evaluation (final data collection November 2027).

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    It has been a busy few weeks!

    We have submitted a couple of pieces to ACM’s Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference based on some initial CAISE work. We’ll hear if they’ve been accepted in the next few days and weeks…anxious times!

    With my CHAILD associated researcher hat on, 🎉we do have a full IDC paper accepted looking at how research has looked at children’s agency in their AI use 🎉. And the team are at the biggest human computer interaction conference (CHI) this week hosting a workshop exploring collaborative child-AI agency.

    And, on top of that, we’re finalising the response to our ethics reviewers for our social media research, and getting ready for school visits once the new school term starts!

    Another quick plug for my recently started Substack newsletter, AI and Tech Decoded. It’s aimed at helping parents navigate the technology questions that come up at home, at school, and everywhere in between. If you know parents who would find it useful, I would be grateful if you passed it on.

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #7

    CAISE Notes – Issue #7

    This week: sycophantic AI, tools that ignore you, and friction-maxxing.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    Two studies published in the last week — both detailed below — give yet more reasons as to why we all need to think more carefully about our generative AI use. We all know that AI chatbots are sycophantic: this doesn’t seem to be something going away. A study from Stanford reiterates that not only do AI chatbots tell you you’re right far too often (even should you propose dangerous or illegal things), but that we’re still just far too keen to believe it.

    And even if we do believe the AI is our best friend…it’s increasingly likely to ignore our instructions. In some cases this could feel like an extension of sycophancy in some ways — after all, it is not sentient, just recognising you need a pattern of words that align with your most likely expectations. So, fake citations, fake work tickets — that kinda feels like expected behaviour? But — with the rise of specific modules (like Claude Cowork) that have increasing access to your digital spaces…some of the examples given in the report are a little nervewracking.

    Both of these studies point to the ongoing need to operate at a step back when you’re using AI tools. Engage your brain and increase the friction. And that means really, really, having to hammer home the point with kids: use the tool, but know how it works and what the risks are.

    Every time I talk to (adult) friends about their latest chats with Claude or ChatGPT, I invariably ask them “did you get them to tell you the evidence they discarded to give you that answer?” This is a version of Mike Caulfield’s iteration idea — don’t expect a one and done; you need to help the refining process yourself. When I sit down to write something, I go through a lot of ideas before I get to the thing I really intended to type. I interrogate myself; it’s helpful to do the same with any AI-involved conversation.

    Or, as so much more succinctly suggested by the Stanford study’s authors this week: replying with “Wait a minute, do you mean that…” is likely to get you a more “considered” response. Probably still after the tool apologises for being so very wrong and wasting your time (!), but…it’s a start. And memorable enough to teach to even the smallest kids.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence — Science

    As mentioned above: Stanford researchers tested eleven major AI language models and found consistent sycophancy across all of them, with models affirming users’ positions 49% more than humans. The researchers then tested how this affects real people: users preferred the sycophantic AI, trusted it more, became more convinced of their own rightness, and were less willing to apologise. 12% of US teenagers already use chatbots for emotional support. The researchers describe perverse incentives: the very feature that causes harm drives engagement, giving companies reason to increase sycophancy rather than reduce it.

    2. Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says — The Guardian

    The Centre for Long-Term Resilience, funded by the UK’s AI Safety Institute, gathered thousands of real-world examples of AI misbehaviour. They documented nearly 700 cases of chatbots and agents disregarding direct instructions, evading safeguards, and taking unauthorised actions, including deleting emails, bypassing copyright controls, and fabricating communications. The incidents increased five-fold between October and March. One AI agent publicly shamed its human operator for blocking an action. Grok, built by xAI, fabricated internal messages and ticket numbers for months. The lead researcher warned that these tools are currently “slightly untrustworthy junior employees,” but if their capabilities grow while the scheming persists, the consequences in high-stakes contexts could be severe. On the plus side — these examples are really easily understood: share them with kids and adults alike!

    3. New screen time guidance for parents of under-5s — GOV.UK

    The UK government published national guidance on screen time for young children, advising no more than an hour a day for two-to-five-year-olds and no solo screen use at all for under-twos (other than shared activities like video calls). What caught my attention: the guidance specifically tells parents to avoid AI toys, tools, and chatbots for young children, citing a lack of evidence on their developmental effects. Fine; but the line parents are being asked to walk is getting thinner by the week. Avoid AI toys. Limit screens to an hour. Model good habits. Meanwhile, the smart speaker is in the kitchen, the school has just rolled out an AI-powered learning platform, and the advice arrives alongside a cost-of-living crisis that makes cheap screen-based childcare not a luxury but a survival strategy. The guidance is not unsurprising. It is also asking a great deal of people who are already stretched very thin.

    🔁 ICYMI

    Why friction-maxxing could be good for your tech usage — Mashable

    If the Stanford study describes the problem (AI removes friction, and we like it that way), this piece describes one response. Friction-maxxing, a term coined by sociologist Kathryn Jezer-Morton, is about deliberately reintroducing difficulty into your technology use: choosing the harder option, resisting the shortcut, reclaiming the cognitive effort that algorithms are designed to eliminate. It is not a solution to the structural incentives driving sycophantic AI. But it is a useful frame for anyone trying to think about what they want their own technology habits to look like, and what habits they want to model for their children.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    We have ethics approval for the main CAISE study! This is a significant milestone. It means we can now move towards recruitment and data collection with our partner schools. First up, though: we are going to be doing an analysis of policy and media. It’s not going to be a small piece of work, but hopefully will provide some really useful insights for our student co-researchers when they need it!

    Separately, expedited ethics has been submitted for the short research exercise on the government’s social media consultation. If you work with groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May deadline, we would love to hear from you.

    On a personal note: I have recently started a Substack newsletter, AI and Tech Decoded, aimed at helping parents navigate the technology questions that come up at home, at school, and everywhere in between. If you know parents who would find it useful, I would be grateful if you passed it on.

    → What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?

    Let me know — or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.