Daily Safeguarding Update

WhatsApp rolling out disappearing photos and video feature

WhatsApp announced that disappearing photo and video features will be rolled out to everyone using the Facebook-owned app this week.
The feature was praised for “giving users more control over their privacy” by Facebook, where media is viewed once and then disappears.
Users will be presented with a ‘seen’ indicator once the intended audience has opened the message.
This announcement stems from Facebook’s ‘privacy-focused vision’, WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption from 2016 and joins the WhatsApp disappearing message update from 2020.
For more information on the risks of disappearing messages, look here. Also, check out our recent safeguarding guide to WhatsApp here, and for bitesize information on how to block, report and mute on this platform, click here.
Full story from TechCrunch, here.

Ofcom’s latest research into digital news consumption in the UK reports that BBC One (62%) remains the most-used source across all platforms, followed by ITV (46%) and Facebook (36%).
The report states that TV is the most used (79%) platform for news, followed by the internet (73%), with approximately 49% of adults using social media.
TV is most prevalent among the 65+ age group (93%), while the internet is the most popular for news among 16-24s (89%) and those from ethnic minority groups (85%).
Despite its popularity, social media is the least trusted source of news.
This relates to yesterday’s news on Twitter’s effort to tackle disinformation and last week’s FutureLearn’s survey findings of social media being used as a ‘top-up’ to education by those born between 1997 and 2015.
For more information on what you can do about misinformation, click here. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused an upsurge in the spread of misinformation, read our blog on how to tackle this.
Full story here.

Following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), UK experts are set to recommend vaccines to 16–17-year-olds.
This would include approximately 1.4 million teenagers, but the date of this new rollout is not yet known.
This is in addition to over-12s who have already been offered the vaccine if they have underlying conditions or live with high-risk or clinically vulnerable people.
Use our helpful animation and storybook to explain coronavirus to the children in your care. You can find it here.
The full story from BBC can be accessed here.

Blizzard Entertainment president J Allen Brack has stepped down following the lawsuit filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles over widespread sexism, sexual harassment, and gender-based discrimination in Activision Blizzard and its subsidiary companies.
The company are responsible for games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.
Many Activision Blizzard staff members walked out in protest in response to the allegations and follows the walk-out organised by World of Warcraft players on the 22nd of July.
The suit filed against Blizzard Entertainment refers to the ‘frat-boy’ culture in the workplace perpetuating gender-based discrimination, particularly for women of colour.
The ‘frat-boy’ culture in the gaming industry has made headlines in the past. In February 2021, Riot Games launched an investigation on their CEO following a gender-discrimination lawsuit after Kotaku’s investigation on the sexism culture at Riot Games in 2019.
Full story here.