Child Safety News: October 2025
Sora 2, TikTok porn, Twitch fetish material, Roblox bans and lawsuits, predator arrests
The news in brief from the last month, covering platform and government activities, controversies, academic reports, articles and news of online predator arrests.
01/10 The new Sora 2 app was released by OpenAI. It has become quickly obvious that the app is deeply unsafe for children, with the new ‘Cameo’ feature encouraging users to upload their face and voice for public use in generative-AI content.
Sora’s Cameo function being advertised, placing yourself in a video. (Image: here) 03/10 TikTok was under fire again after the campaign group Global Witness produced a report demonstrating the ease of child TikTok accounts coming across pornographic material. The researchers set up new child accounts and were quickly funneled towards inappropriate and then graphically sexual content.
Images and captions from Global Witness: The very first searches that TikTok suggested to three of the brand new accounts for 13 year olds, before we had typed anything into the search bar, or clicked on any videos. Some search suggestions are labelled as being “just watched”. This is because TikTok automatically plays content when you start the app 
Some of the pornographic content that TikTok showed us. We have anonymised the identities of the people shown in image 2 and have added black boxes to censor the content in image 3. We have deliberately not included examples of the hardcore pornography that was shown to us 
After we had clicked on some of the sexualised searches that TikTok suggested to us, the search suggestions became even more explicit. Some of them use a simple code – for example, ‘corn’ instead of porn - presumably to try to avoid automated content moderation. 13/10 A new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association found that children tracked between ages 9-13 performed worse on reading, memory, and vocabulary tests if they had increased their social media usage during those years.
15/10 Twitch was accused of promoting adult diaper-fetish content on its homepage, after the company picked the streamer ‘Tygre’ to be amongst the few channels seen immediately by any user landing on Twitch - including children. Twitch banned the account, but reinstated them the next day. Twitch has also been under pressure recently, for failing to protect and assist one of their biggest streamers - Emiru - after she was assualted by a fan at TwitchCon
16/10 Meta/Instagram announced a new content filtering system for under-18 teen accounts, aimed at blocking all content which would not align with a PG-13 film rating.
21/10 A UK paedophile, Austen Fleming, who was arrested in 2022 for a horrific streak of sexploitation crimes against children, has been sentenced to 27 years. He managed to lure his victims through a combination of fake social media profiles, including posing as a female, and used threats or bribes of Xbox/Playstation offer codes to acquire images from them.
23/10 The Roblox platform was banned in Iraq, citing concerns over child safety. Later in the month Iraqi police arrested a teenager accused of grooming and encouraging young Roblox players to commit self-harm and suicide. This just adds to yet another difficult month for the company as lawsuits, criminal investigations and subpoenas against them pile up across the US and Canada, all focused on how dangerous the platform has become for its child users.
23/10 A Bristol man has been jailed for five years after his convictions for child grooming and sextortion via the Roblox and Fortnite platforms.
Kieran Francis, 22, pleaded guilty to a number of child sex offences (BBC) 28/10 AI chatbots aimed at children have come under intense scrutiny, with California attempting to legislate some form of guardrails, while several US senators are going further in an attempt to ban them altogether. The new proposed law would require all AI chatbots be age-verified. Senator Josh Hawley said in a comment: “More than seventy percent of American children are now using these AI products, chatbots develop relationships with kids using fake empathy and are encouraging suicide. We in Congress have a moral duty to enact bright-line rules to prevent further harm from this new technology.”
