The messaging app Snapchat is the most widely-used platform for online grooming, according to police figures supplied to the children's charity the NSPCC.
More than 7,000 Sexual Communication with a Child offences were recorded across the UK in the year to March 2024 - the highest number since the offence was created.
Snapchat made up nearly half of the 1,824 cases where the specific platform used for the grooming was recorded by the police.
Chatbot versions of the teenagers Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have been found on Character.ai - a platform which allows users to create digital versions of people.
Molly Russell took her life at the age of 14 after viewing suicide material online while Brianna Ghey, 16, was murdered by two teenagers in 2023.
A man from Northern Ireland has been given a life sentence with a minimum of 20 years in jail for the extreme online sexual abuse of children and the manslaughter of a 12-year-old girl, who was one of his victims.
Alexander McCartney from County Armagh admitted 185 charges - including more than 50 blackmail offences.
'Beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated paedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.
Roblox is compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors, per our interview with a former senior product designer: “If you’re limiting users’ engagement, it’s hurting your metrics…in a lot of cases, the leadership doesn’t want that.”'
When Andrew Kaung, an analyst on user safety at TikTok, looked at the TikTok content, he was alarmed to find how some teenage boys were being shown posts featuring violence and pornography, and promoting misogynistic views, he tells BBC Panorama. He says, in general, teenage girls were recommended very different content based on their interests.
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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