Every new year sees new trends, risks, and threats to online safety emerge, especially for children and young people. This can seem overwhelming (and sometimes even frightening) if you feel like you’ve just got your head around the last new ‘thing’.

To help you stay ahead of the curve, iNEQE online safety experts have combined their analysis with concerns from parents, carers, teachers, and safeguarding professionals. Keep reading to learn more about the biggest online safety trends, risks, and threats for children and young people in 2022.

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For 10 years, Matthew Hardy harassed people online by creating fake social media accounts to spread lies about them.

His targets had very little in common - they varied in age, had unconnected jobs and were living in different areas when they were targeted.

However, one thing they all shared was a persistent paranoia, brought on by not knowing the identity of the person behind the accounts or why they were being targeted.

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The draft online safety bill would not stop the sharing of "insidious" images of child abuse and violence against women and girls, MPs have said.

The Commons culture committee warned the government its proposed legislation is not clear or robust enough.

Content which is currently technically legal, such as deepfake pornography, still needs addressing, they said.

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The Metropolitan Police has not launched a criminal investigation into Britain’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout, nor are officers shutting down vaccination centres as a result.

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Opposition to Covid vaccinations has come in many forms, but none stranger than the "sovereign citizen" defence.

It uses defunct ancient English law to try to challenge regulations.

Some anti-vaccination protesters outside schools and hospitals have used this to hand out fake legal documents to teachers, parents and health workers.

Others have sought to remove Covid patients from intensive care wards, citing non-existent "common law" empowering them to do so.

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A new initiative to divert young people away from criminality has been launched after cyber attacks designed to block access to schools’ networks or websites more than doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic.

There was a 107 per cent increase in reports from the police cyber prevent network of students as young as nine deploying DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks from 2019 to 2020.

Many referrals into the NCCU’s Prevent team are for children of secondary school age, with the median age at 15 and the youngest at nine.

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