Platform Safety Watch
Platform Safety WatchDigital Safety & Accountability
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Platform Safety Watch/Risk areas/Child & teen safety
Area 01 · High priority

Child & teen safety

Protecting under-18s from grooming, sexualised exposure, fake adult profiles, coercive private contact, sextortion and unsafe live-streaming environments. The single most important safety surface on every platform we review.

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What this covers

Scope of this assessment area

Adult-oriented platforms hold a hard line: under-18 presence on either side of the camera is a regulatory, criminal and humanitarian failure. We assess whether platforms are actually capable of detecting and responding to it, not just whether they say they prohibit it.

Signals & indicators

What we look for

Observable patterns that trigger investigation under this area.

01
Grooming over weeksAdults building trust slowly, then steering minors into private chat or off-platform messaging.
02
Adults posing as minorsFake young personas used to attract predators or extract content from real teens.
03
Minors posing as adultsStolen IDs, reused selfies and family-photo verification used to bypass age gates.
04
Off-platform redirectionConversation moved to Telegram / WhatsApp / Snapchat where the platform cannot see it.
05
Coercive private chatThreats, secrecy demands and incentives used to keep contact hidden.
06
Suspected-minor contentContent where the apparent age is in dispute and review is slow or absent.
07
Fake-age verificationVerification flows that accept stock IDs, deepfake selfies or reused biometric checks.
08
Coordinated targetingNetworks of accounts hitting the same demographic with identical scripts.
Assessment framework

Criteria a platform is scored against

Each criterion is publicly defined and applied consistently across every platform we review.

Identity & age rigor at sign-up

Liveness-checked ID with biometric continuity, not a checkbox declaration of age.

Minor-detection systems

Image and behavioural classifiers that flag suspected under-age presence in real time.

Reporting & escalation paths

Always-on routes to NCMEC, IWF, INHOPE and national child-safety authorities.

Trained human reviewers

Specialist teams handling CSAM and child-safety reports, not generic moderators.

Practical next steps

If you are affected - what to do first

Sequential, low-risk actions you can take right now.

STEP 01

Preserve

Screenshot the profile, the chat, the room URL and the timestamp before anything is deleted.

STEP 02

Report to authorities

NCMEC CyberTipline (US/global), IWF (UK) or your national child-safety hotline first.

STEP 03

Report to platform

Use the platform's child-safety report path, cite the timestamps and link to your report.

STEP 04

Get support

Reach a child-safety helpline; do not engage with the suspected actor again.

Have evidence in this area?

Submit confidentially - encrypted at rest, named reviewers only, you can submit anonymously.

Submit evidenceHow evidence is handled