I'm a cybersecurity expert - my daughter won’t have social media until she’s 16

If you knew what I know, you probably would too.

We spend billions protecting companies from cyberattacks, fraud, ransomware and hostile digital threats. Businesses have security teams, monitoring systems, threat intelligence and strict safeguards because we understand how dangerous the online world has become.

Yet when it comes to children, we hand them smartphones and unrestricted access to platforms filled with predators, scammers, violent pornography, blackmail gangs and algorithms designed to keep them psychologically dependent from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep.

We are protecting corporations better than we are protecting our own kids.

The government is finally beginning to acknowledge the scale of the crisis. Liz Kendall has said action on social media restrictions for under-16s is coming this year, alongside stronger age verification and wider online safety measures. That conversation should have started years ago because the threat landscape facing children today barely resembles the internet most parents think they understand.

This stopped being a debate about screen time a long time ago.

Teenagers are being targeted in sextortion scams by organised criminal gangs who trick them into sharing images before demanding money under the threat of humiliation. Children are being groomed through gaming platforms and private chat groups by adults they believe are friends. Young people are being recruited as money mules for criminal networks through social media platforms they use every day after school.

Artificial intelligence is now supercharging all of it. And no government anywhere in the world has managed to solve the problems we already have, never mind the ones coming next.

We are moving into a world where criminals can clone a child’s voice from a few seconds of audio, create fake video calls that look real, generate explicit imagery from innocent photographs and build convincing fake identities in seconds. The old warning signs people relied on are disappearing fast.

A teenager no longer needs to fall for a badly written scam email. They can receive a FaceTime call from what appears to be another teenager. They can hear a familiar voice begging for help. They can be manipulated with content that appears completely authentic because AI has made deception cheap, fast, and scalable.

At the same time, recommendation algorithms continue feeding children increasingly extreme material because outrage, fear and dependency keep people online for longer.

The tech sector keeps arguing that restrictions are difficult to enforce because teenagers may bypass them with VPNs or alternative platforms. That logic is ridiculous. We do not abandon safeguarding in every other part of society simply because some people break the rules.

Features like autoplay, infinite scroll, streaks and constant notifications are not harmless product design. They are behavioural engineering systems built to capture attention and maximise dependency.

Most parents still picture online danger as a stranger in a chatroom. The reality is industrialised, automated and operating at an enormous scale.

Social media is no longer just a parenting issue.

It is a cybersecurity issue, a public safety issue and one of the biggest child protection failures of the modern era.

I’m not letting my daughter be part of that.

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Graeme Stewart is the Head of Public Sector at Check Point.

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