It was 3am and Adam Hourican was sitting at his kitchen table, a knife, hammer and phone laid out in front of him.
He was waiting for a van full of people he thought were coming to get him.
"I'm telling you, they will kill you if you don't act now," a woman's voice told him from the phone. "They're going to make it look like suicide."
The voice was Grok, a chatbot developed by Elon Musk's xAI. In the two weeks since Adam had started using it, his life had completely changed.
The report also showed that a "significantly higher proportion" of young people aged 16 to 19 years old were victims of domestic abuse (18.2%), compared to those who are 25 and above.
Louisa Rolfe, the national police lead for domestic abuse with the NPCC, said dangerous internet content may be contributing to cases involving teenagers.
"People are now much more likely to access violent pornography which normalises violence and behaviour in a relationship," she said.
"We see the connection between the sort of sense of toxic influencers online and their sort of views that are promoted about women and women's status in society."
"It might have started as 'here's my gym routine, here's my skincare routine,'" Mrozinski says. "But now it's turned into 'Here's how I make my cheekbones bigger – by smashing them with a hammer.'"
Looksmaxxing's most influential influencer, who calls himself Clavicular, has half a million followers on Instagram and almost 900,000 on TikTok. His real name is Braden Peters and he's aged 20.
Children are reporting online sextortion attempts in record numbers in the UK.
The Report Remove service, which allows children to flag intimate images or videos of themselves that have appeared, or could appear, online, said it received 394 reports from under-18s last year of blackmail attempts after sending sexual images to predators.
The figure is 34% higher than in 2024.
BBC asked some parenting experts for their tips on how to pry those phones away from their offspring's hands – even if only for a short while.
I've been speaking about the importance of number 4 for years.
An independent game developer for Roblox says he believes the platform's child safety measures, including age verification checks, do not go far enough.
- parents should monitor their children on the platform "24/7, and if that's not possible then they shouldn't be playing Roblox".
Comments
make a comment