Tag: ethics

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #16

    CAISE Notes – Issue #16

    This week: Norway bans generative AI in primary schools; a Stanford study finds that giving children an AI tutor is not the same as them using one; and a new Anthropic policy shows what age verification actually costs. Plus, the first of a collaboration on the social media consultation survey.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    I’m at IDC 2026 this week, and the world is melting, so this is a short one.

    It’s almost a relief to have three AI (not social media) news stories this week, but — but! — they echo some of the issues that have come out around the arguments on banning social media for kids. Norway has banned generative AI in elementary schools (age 6–13: an age where they wouldn’t technically be expected to access it out of home?), and Anthropic is making more noise about how it must up its use of age verification tools — so more adults will have to provide copies of formal documentation to goodness knows whom to access the service. Offset that against the story in the middle: researchers find that kids don’t actually want to use AI tutors, actually? Making the speed around decisions to ban continue to look out of touch with the use amongst the average kid. This is a very hot topic at the conference this week: hopefully by next week I can report on some of the research coming out of it!

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Norway is banning generative AI in elementary schools starting this autumn — TNW

    From late August, generative AI tools will be barred for children in years one to seven, ages six to 13. Students aged 14 to 16 will be allowed to use them only under a teacher’s direct supervision. Over-17s are trusted to manage it themselves.

    The logic is borrowed straight from Norway’s 2024 school smartphone ban, and that ban has an evidence base behind it. A study by Sara Abrahamsson of more than 400 middle schools found it was followed by less bullying, better grades, and a sharp drop in visits to psychological specialists, with the strongest effects among girls. But: the smartphone ban came in response to falling test scores. There’s no comparable signal that AI use in Norwegian classrooms has reached a level that produces measurable harm. The new ban is precautionary (which is not in itself a bad thing, but should be the start, not the end, of the investigation).

    2. Research on AI tutoring ran into a problem: most students wouldn’t use it — Chalkbeat

    Stanford researchers set out to test whether a human tutor’s encouragement would get children to spend more time with an AI literacy tutor. It did, by between one and four minutes a week. Many children never logged on at all.

    The platform’s own guidance said 30 minutes a week would improve reading. In the afterschool setting, children working independently averaged about two minutes a week, rising to three with a tutor alongside them. There was no meaningful difference in reading scores between the groups. As the lead author put it, having access to the tool was not the same as using it.

    Additionally: the children who did log on were more likely to be already higher-performing, and less likely to have additional needs. So the tool reached the children least likely to need the catch-up it promises, at least when presented in this way. And the study is a quiet rebuke to the access logic that drives so much of this, on both sides.

    3. Anthropic says Claude may want to see your ID — TechCrunch

    A new version of Anthropic’s privacy policy, due to take effect on 8 July, says the company may in certain circumstances ask users to verify their age or identity by uploading a government-issued ID, along with a selfie or video, from which it builds a face geometry template. Some US states treat that template as legally protected biometric data (as do countries that apply GDPR or similar data protection laws). Anthropic’s account, reported by TechCrunch, is that this applies to a small subset of users whose accounts have been flagged but not banned, as part of an appeals process, and that the checks run through a third-party verifier. TechCrunch notes the verifier is backed by a Peter Thiel fund and has drawn criticism elsewhere, and that Anthropic would not say how long the documents are kept.

    The reason this belongs in a newsletter about children is that it shows what age assurance actually looks like once it leaves the policy document. To prove a child is a child, you build an infrastructure that asks everyone to hand a government ID and a scan of their face to a private company.

    🔁 ICYMI

    The sub-par science of the social media ban, Part 1 — The Neuroscience of Everyday Life

    I’ve been working with Dean Burnett to dig into the wider problems with the framing of the UK’s social media consultation, and this is the first of the pieces on this. Where my entry point has been the young children’s survey, his has been the parent’s one. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that we’ve come to similar conclusions — and that there are far too many of those conclusions for a single blogpost.

    Part 1 looks at two things. The speed: the consultation ran from early March to late May, with roughly three weeks between it closing and the ban being announced, against the equal-marriage consultation’s longer run and six months of review before any decision. And who answered: of around 116,000 contributions, only about 12% came through routes built for children and young people, while some 33,000 were campaign emails in which people signed a standard pro-ban text, each counted as an individual submission.

    The point is not that worried parents are wrong. It’s that a self-selecting sample of the most worried adults is not the same thing as evidence. Worth looking at the graphs showing the difference between the responses given by the focus groups run alongside the consultation, and the parent responses to the consultation to see why we’ve come to that conclusion.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    I’m at IDC this week, enjoying workshops on building community-centred AI literacy, writing a manifesto on children’s rights as they pertain to AI in edtech…and presenting my short literature review paper today (Wednesday). So it’s mostly conference and not much else from me.

    → 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 #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 #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 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.

  • We received ethics approval!

    We received ethics approval!

    We received the formal go ahead from UCL IoE’s ethics committee last week.

    This is a big deal: in order to get to this point, you have to tell the committee everything you’re planning to do — every question you might ask, where you’ll keep every pieces of data, how you’ll manage every risk you think you might face…and they have to be happy with it. Until they are, you can’t collect any data at all.

    Now we can, so…let’s go!

  • CAISE Notes – Issue #5

    CAISE Notes – Issue #5

    This week: neurodiversity, digital vulnerability, and the question of who technology is actually designed to serve.

    🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…

    This week is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. Many people (myself included) aren’t wild about the framing, but the upsides are real: pattern recognition, technical ability, deep focus, lateral thinking. As anyone who is ND, or has kids with ND traits, knows, though — sometimes those great things don’t feel like fair recompense for living in a world that quite simply doesn’t fit right.

    Communication is a core issue. Autistic researcher Damian Milton calls this the double empathy problem: difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are not a deficit in the autistic person but a mismatch between two different ways of experiencing the world. Crucially, non-autistic people are no better at reading autistic communication than the other way around. The difficulty runs in both directions. Only one side is ever asked to do the work.

    Enter the internet. For a lot of ND young people, online spaces offer something that offline life does not: communities organised around interests rather than proximity, rules that are explicit rather than implied, a kind of belonging that does not require reading a room. It’s parallel play writ large. Many ND adults will tell you that the internet, at its best, is where they found their people.

    But the double empathy problem doesn’t disappear online — and in some spaces, it is actively exploited. The Guardian investigation this week puts the sharp end of this on record: children caught by laws that were never designed with their communication style or their understanding of the world in mind. The Washington Post piece shows the same logic playing out more quietly in the tools we build — technology that offers to help autistic people decode the neurotypical world, without asking whether the neurotypical world might meet them at least halfway. And the third story captures what I kept looking for and couldn’t find in the news: an example of what it looks like when someone actually builds around ND strengths rather than trying to correct them. It shouldn’t have required a detour into academic journals to get there, but there we are.

    📰 Three things worth your attention

    1. Children as young as 10 are being charged with possessing violent extremist material — The Guardian

    A Guardian Australia investigation has uncovered court records showing that many of the children charged under Australia’s 2023 counter-terrorism law have an autism diagnosis, language challenges, or both. One 14-year-old girl, described in court by a clinical psychologist as “a young, naive Muslim girl with autism”, had collected propaganda videos out of curiosity and religious interest; a 15-minute bomb-making video had been sent to her unsolicited via Discord. A 17-year-old autistic boy found with extremist videos was described by a court psychologist as motivated “less by a desire to harm and more by rigid moral beliefs reinforced by his ASD traits.” These are not cases where the law is catching dangerous children. They are cases where the law is catching vulnerable ones. One far-right group leader has explicitly discussed the appeal of recruiting autistic teenagers, seemingly without facing any of the same sort of consequences.

    2. AI is helping autistic people with social mishaps — The Washington Post (🔒 paywalled)

    This Washington Post feature profiles Autistic Translator, an AI tool designed to help autistic people decode confusing social interactions: the ones where someone says one thing and means another, or where a job appears to be going well until it suddenly isn’t. The tool fills a genuine gap. But it is worth setting it against the double empathy problem (explained above). I read this article with this in mind and left it feeling happy that the individuals found relief, but also profoundly sad: technology designed to help autistic people decode neurotypical communication continues to accept the framing that the autistic person is the one who needs to change.

    3.Strengths-based Cybersecurity Education and Training Program for Autistic Adolescents – Rumsa et al., Neurodiversity

    I went looking for a news story to end on something more hopeful. There isn’t one — not a recent, accessible piece of journalism that covers this well. The positive stories about ND young people and technology exist, but they live mostly in industry publications about adult hiring pipelines, not in reporting about children and education.

    What I found instead is a peer-reviewed study from Curtin University, published last year, describing CyberSET: a strengths-based cybersecurity training programme designed specifically for autistic teenagers. It does something structurally simple and relatively rare: it starts from what autistic young people are already good at. Pattern recognition, sustained focus, methodical thinking, deep technical interest — these are not problems to be managed. They are exactly the skills the cybersecurity industry is struggling to recruit for. Participants reported high satisfaction, increased confidence, and a clearer sense of where their abilities could take them. A massive win!

    🔁 ICYMI

    Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet — Joe Tidy (Waterstones | Amazon | Blackwell’s)

    Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first cyber correspondent. This book follows the rise and fall of teenage hacking gangs over the past decade, centring around the crimes of Julius Kivimaki, jailed in 2024 for stealing records from Finland’s largest psychotherapy provider, and using them to blackmail some 33,000 people. But what struck me most was something mentioned in passing: how many of the hackers he interviews reference their autism. Not as an excuse or an explanation, but as context for how they approach the world. The ethical frame is not absent so much as differently structured. Hacking is a matter of technical skill. If your data is unsecured, that is your problem.

    That framing sits directly alongside everything else in this issue. Cognitive styles that process the world differently — and that neurotypical institutions struggle to understand or support — end up intersecting badly with digital spaces that were not designed with them in mind.

    🔬 What’s new with CAISE

    Ethics approval revisions came back this week. They were minor (hurrah!), and the updated application has been resubmitted.

    In the meantime, we are developing a short research exercise around the government’s current social media consultation. Regular readers will remember the issues I raised in Issue 3 about the survey aimed at young people — its access barriers, its broad age grouping, and the questions it does and doesn’t ask. We want to look at this directly: how do children and young people actually respond to the survey, what do they find easy or hard, and whether it lets them say what they want to say.

    If you work with or know groups of young people aged 10 to 21 who might want to take part before the 26 May consultation deadline, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch.

    → 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.