Word of the Year – Rage Bait
You may have already seen it, but if not the word of the year from Oxford University Press for 2025 is ‘rage bait‘. Its origins go back to 2002 and is defined as ‘online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive’. Rage bait is very closely tied to clickbait, the purpose being to entice people into clicking links, watching videos etc. in order to increase traffic. Both are very effective, proven tactics used by individuals and groups to drive engagement and feed algorithms, but rage bait differs as it is the deliberate intent to provoke. Much of this you can see on apps such as TikTok and YouTube and much of the content is now created using GenAI feeding into the whole AI slop phenomenon.
Interestingly the word of the year for 2024 was ‘brain rot’. Does this suggest people are becoming tiresome of the online world? This could be an interesting discussion topic with children and young people: is the online world what they want it to be?
Under 5’s – Social Media Usage Increasing
I doubt this will come as much of a surprise to many, particularly teachers of younger children. On Monday this week the Centre for Social Justice reported an estimated rise of 220,000 users under 5 compared to 2024, bringing the estimated number of children aged 3-5 actively using social media to 814,000 here in the UK. Research from Ofcom earlier this year showed that 19 percent of children aged 3-5 using social media do so independently. No oversight, no moderation!
If correct these figures are horrifying. Not only that, the figures are surprising because many young parents today went through their adolescent years using social media, they know (or should know) the potential harms related to safety and wellbeing. It will be very interesting to see next year whether the Online Safety Act has had any positive effect on this where user to user services (including social media) have been required to put highly effective age verification in place. I’m sceptical but remain hopeful.
Google Issues VPN Warning
Virtual Private Networks, usually an app that can disguise the location of a person/device and encrypt the data. There’s a lot of understandable concern, particularly around older students using VPN’s, but we have to be careful with any advice we’re giving to students.
The main media topics around the use of VPN’s by students and the sudden massive surge over the last few months is to circumvent the so-called porn laws (age verification) that are coming in around the world and already in place in the UK. I disagree with this, there may be a very small number of students using VPN’s for this purpose, but the large majority will be adult males.
A significant number of students always have and always will use VPN’s for other purposes, such as being able to watch programmes that are on Netflix in the US but not the UK, or simply for privacy reasons, particularly in relation to commercial organisations and collecting personal data for marketing/advertising purposes.
In a recent school I was invited to for a Year 11 talk, around a fifth of these students were using VPN’s, a significant number of those were using free VPN’s, and for me that’s the biggest concern.
I openly promote the use of VPN’s particularly for privacy and security reasons (e.g. when using public WiFi), but when something is free privacy and security is often eroded. Recently Google issued their latest fraud and scams advisory, whilst it covers a few things such as online jobs scams, the one which caught my attention was in relation to VPN’s. As Google states there are a plethora of apps which are disguised as legitimate VPN services, which are then used to collect personal/private data or even to install malicious software onto a users device.
Regardless of our thoughts about young people and their use of VPN’s, it is important that we give them clear, balanced advice. My personal advice is to never use a free VPN if at all possible, but knowing that some cannot afford the annual/monthly subscription fee they should carry out due diligence to ensure the app or browser extension is legitimate by checking out the company and online reviews first.
For Parents – Sharenting
For a multitude of different reasons the advice we give to children and young people is to be careful with what they’re sharing online, including images. This can be anything from protecting your privacy to very serious harms such as blackmail including sextortion. For example, an article in the Guardian refers to a report from the NSPCC where nearly 1 in 10 parents say their child has been blackmailed online and the National Crime Agency are receiving around 110 reports of sextortion each month.
That education we give to children and young people extends to parents, caregivers, schools and anyone else that may share data, such as images, of children. We must be mindful of the potential uses of that data.
The Irish Data Commission has recently released a short (40 seconds) light-hearted but serious video about the risks of sharenting along with some useful advice.
You can see the video and advice HERE and you can read the Guardian article HERE.
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