Between April 2025 and March 2026, Snapchat was mentioned in 324 counselling sessions where a young person also spoke about their experience of online sexual abuse – a 19% increase on the previous year.
TikTok (234 mentions), Instagram (197 mentions), Discord (92 mentions) and WhatsApp (39 mentions) have been named as the other top platforms mentioned in counselling sessions where online sexual abuse was the main concern, during the same period.
In fact, online sexual abuse has been the most commonly discussed concern in Childline counselling where Snapchat and Instagram were mentioned over the past three years.
This comes as the Government’s deadline for companies to introduce nudity blocking technology on children’s phones and tablets is set to expire today, on 8 September 2026.
Devastating online harms like grooming, sexual extortion and online child sexual abuse often begin with the sharing of a single semi-nude or nude image.
To prevent these images from being created, shared or viewed, the Government announced in June that Big Tech companies like Apple and Google had three months to adopt nudity blocking technology on all smartphones and tablets used by children in the UK.
Tech companies were on notice that they had to act swiftly, but we’re frustrated by the slow pace of change to fix an issue that’s affecting children and young people every single day.
We’re now urging the Government to follow through on their promise to protect children and create laws so strong protections are in place.
We believe new legal safeguards on devices are particularly important as those committing the crimes often harm children across a range of online spaces, including private messaging services and gaming platforms which aren’t covered by the upcoming social media ban.
Earlier this month, we revealed the top ten platforms children talked about in all Childline counselling sessions last year. In total there were over 5,500 mentions of these sites, with 15% of sessions mentioning online sexual abuse as the main concern.
