Josh Halliday,  North of England Editor  -  The Guardian (U.K.)Stephan: I increasingly see stories about children, both boys and girls, who have been exploited on social media in what is now being called, as this article describes, as sextortion. It is becoming a major cause of suicide in young people, particularly girls.  The internet is a sewer, and ever more toxic. As I have published in the past no child 13 or younger should have access to a smartphone. But that is just a part of it. This technology has been developed with almost no serious discussion by Democrats or Republicans about how to make it a system with integrity. How do free speech and morality reconcile? You can't yell "fire" in a theater, but you can post the most vile weaponized misinformation. Americans and the American culture, as well as the people and cultures in other democracies, are all being poisoned by what social media has become. The UK’s National Crime Agency has launched an ‘unprecedented’ campaign to alert teachers, parents and children to the dangers of being blackmailed into sharing abusive, explicit images. Credit: The Good Brigade / Getty Tech companies including Snapchat and Facebook reported more than 9,600 cases of adults grooming children online in the UK in just six months last year – the equivalent of about 400 a week. Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers. The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) last year received 546,000 reports from tech firms of adults across the world soliciting children – a 192% increase from 2023. As many as 9,600 of these reports came from the UK in the first six months of 2024. Snapchat reported far more troubling material to NCMEC than any other platform in that period, its records show. The children’s charity, NSPCC, described the figures as “shocking” and said they were likely an underestimate. The NCA has launched what [...]

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