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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Adults who work with Young People News

17 August 2024

Performers working in the games industry have spoken of their distress at being asked to work on explicit content without notice, including a scene featuring a sexual assault.

Sex scenes are common in modern games - and are often made by filming human actors who are then digitised into game characters.

They describe feeling "shaken" and "upset" after acting them out.

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09 August 2024

Two men have been jailed for stirring up hatred on social media during widespread disorder across parts of the UK.

Tyler Kay, 26, was sentenced to 38 months in prison for publishing "utterly repulsive, racist" posts on X.

Jordan Parlour, 28, received a 20-month prison sentence for publishing written material intended to stir racial hatred on Facebook.

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08 August 2024

What connects a dad living in Lahore in Pakistan, an amateur hockey player from Nova Scotia - and a man named Kevin from Houston, Texas?

They’re all linked to Channel3Now - a website whose story giving a false name for the 17-year-old charged over the Southport attack was widely quoted in viral posts on X. Channel3Now also wrongly suggested the attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat last year.

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01 August 2024

It’s become a familiar pattern of events: a violent, terrifying attack unfolds, innocent people are killed, and social media is set alight with unfounded - and often incorrect - accusations about about the assailant's identity and what the motivation was.

Think back to the stabbing attacks in Sydney earlier this year, falsely blamed on a Jewish student, or even the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July.

It’s the same with Monday’s attack on a children’s holiday dance and yoga session in Southport, England.

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14 June 2024

"Vote Reform UK", "Only Reform UK has a real plan for Britain" - an account on X has posted these and similar messages every couple of hours since the start of the election campaign.

The account, GenZBloomer, is one of dozens across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok which the BBC has identified as posting hundreds of repeated messages in comment threads expressing support for Reform UK.

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