Over 40,000 verified reports of online child sexual exploitation were made to The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) in 2022–23. That’s over 100 reports every day. And these numbers are trending upwards. Cases of sextortion have soared by 400 percent in some states in the last 18 months. Targets and perpetrators Young people Read more
New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies say the internet is increasingly putting kids at risk of of online sexual exploitation. New Zealand Customs Service, New Zealand Police and the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) work in partnership to identify child victims and target offenders involved in the online sexual abuse of children, in New Zealand and Read more
Kyle Winkler, co-creator of an Instagram meme account called “I Need God In Every Moment Of My Life,” says that Catholicism and Christianity are gaining interest from unexpected sources. He believes the pattern is partly a reaction against the stigma toward religion in older generations, with gen Z now able to customise their belief systems Read more
Pope Francis was hospitalised in Rome last week with a respiratory infection. Yet according to the internet, the entire incident could’ve been avoided had he worn the AI-generated puffer coat that took the digital world by storm last week. With the Pope’s illness happening shortly after the image was posted online, internet users quipped that Read more
It’s a message young people in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hear early and often: You should get married because marriage is wonderful and family life is at the heart of the faith. The problem is that church leaders haven’t grasped the power of cultural trends in technology, education and economics that Read more
I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and cancelled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took Read more
Someone did something silly, and now you need a way to say they’re forgiven. How do you do that in emojis? The Forgivemoji campaign encourages people to design an emoji that represents forgiveness. The team behind the campaign will then decide on the best entry and then submit it to the Unicode Consortium. Read more
A survey of schools has exposed a yawning gap in home internet access for school students in rich and poor New Zealand families. The survey found that at one in six of the country’s poorest schools, less than a quarter of students had access to internet at home. Read more
Henry Kissinger, ‘historian and occasional practising statesman,’ has flagged concerns about the effect digital technology is having on humanity. He says “for all its achievements, it runs the risk of turning on itself as its impositions overwhelm its conveniences. “Beyond factual questions (“What is the temperature outside?”), questions about the nature of reality or the Read more
In the last few years, many of my home communicants have found a great deal of comfort, encouragement and sustenance in quite a recent phenomenon: the growth of live Masses available on the internet Read More