23 Minutes

##A note before you start: this one talks about pornography, including violent pornography, and sexual violence against teenagers. Look after yourself.##

Twenty three minutes. Just 23 minutes.

That is all it takes. Set up a brand new account as a thirteen year old boy. Do not go looking for anything. Watch a bit of football, some gym clips, the normal stuff a boy watches. Twenty three minutes is all it takes for the algorithm to start feeding him toxic, women-hating content he never asked for. After twenty six minutes, it's serving him the manfluencers who will finish the job. Researchers at Dublin City University did exactly that, on blank phones, and timed it. [1]

The three teenage boys who raped two teenage girls in Fordingbridge, and walked out of court with no prison, were not born knowing how to do that. Somebody taught them. Something taught them. Between being a small boy and standing in that courtroom as a slightly older one, they learned that a girl was a thing you could do what you liked to. So who taught them?

Well, I think the answer is sitting in our children's pockets. Social media, and an open door to the whole internet, handed over young, into a space nobody is keeping safe.

My two older kids got phones when they started secondary school. So I can reach them, so they can reach me, so they are safe walking home. But that same phone, the one meant to keep them safe, is the most dangerous thing I have ever handed them. So I have locked it down completely. No social media. No WhatsApp. Nothing. Because twenty three minutes is less time than it takes me to get them out the door in the morning, and no amount of me hovering at their shoulder beats that.

So where is the teaching that should fill the gap? Barely anywhere. For years the statutory guidance schools actually work from, written back in 2019, hardly mentioned pornography at all, long after kids had already been watching it. New guidance finally deals with porn, misogyny and violence against women properly. It does not, however, reach classrooms until September 2026, long after the horse has bolted. [4] So a boy of 11 or 12, full of questions nobody is answering, is left with a great big empty space where the answers should be. It also does not help when the grown men in his life stay silent on it. But this was never really about one absent dad. It is about what rushes into that empty space, for free, in his pocket, while no one is stopping it.

The worst men on the internet got there first. Andrew Tate is the loudest of them, the one everyone can name. Banned from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube back in 2022. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and handed him his account straight back, and he is still there now, posting to over ten million followers. [2] But Tate is not the problem. Tate is the symptom. He is just the most famous face of an entire industry of men who worked out you can get rich telling frightened, lonely boys that their loneliness is a woman's fault. That strength means dominance. That kindness is weakness. That a girl is a prize, or a threat, but never a person. [2]

And the algorithm does not push this at boys because boys asked for it. It pushes it because it works. Rage keeps him watching. Shock keeps him watching. Contempt keeps him watching. And watching is the whole business. Every extra minute a boy stares at his screen is money. So a machine worth billions has quietly worked out that radicalising a generation of boys is good for business. That is not a glitch they are scrambling to fix, but the machine doing precisely what it was built to do.

The average age a child in the UK first sees pornography is 13. One in ten have seen it by nine. Nine. [3] And it is not the soft stuff. The Children's Commissioner found most of these kids are not even looking for it. It is served to them, the same way Tate is, and a huge amount of what they are shown is violent. Choking. Aggression. A girl in pain treated as the normal main event. [3]

So we have a generation of boys whose sex education, the real one, the one that actually shapes what they think a girl is for, is being written by manfluencers and pornographers. Not by a teacher. Not by a decent man in their life sitting them down and saying no, son, that is not how you treat someone.

There's a hole where the teaching should be. A machine that profits from filling it with poison. And a boy at the end of it who has been told ten thousand times, before he even starts secondary school, that a girl is a thing.

And then everyone acts surprised when three of them end up in a courtroom, as if they were a few bad apples. They are not bad apples. They are the harvest. Big tech planted this, season after season, and a culture that would rather look away let it grow.

I know there is a lot of noise right now about just banning social media for under sixteens, like Australia did. And I think it is a good idea. I feel the pull of it in my gut, and I have done exactly that in my own house. It is just not as simple as a blanket ban. There are real risks of shoving kids into even darker, even less watched corners of the internet, and those have to be thought through, not waved away. And what about the older teenagers who have already had years of this poured into them? A ban does not undo what a seventeen year old already learned at eleven. That damage is done, and undoing it is slower, harder work than switching something off. Difficult things are never black and white.

What I really want is for the people who built this, the people who profit from this, and the people who are paid to regulate it, to actually take responsibility. They will not do it on their own. Why would they, when the harm is exactly what makes them their billions? They move when they are made to, and not one second before. Right now it is an unregulated minefield, and they have been allowed to shrug and point at the parents, as if a mum with a screen time app could beat a machine built by thousands of people to be impossible to put down. And regulation always limps years behind the technology anyway. We will finally force them to make this corner safe, and the next nightmare will already be loose. AI can strip the clothes off a real girl's photo in seconds now, it is being done to children, and the law is still arguing with itself while it happens. [13] No more. Make them build the thing safely, or make them pay when it maims a child. Both. Forever.

The good news... I think the dam is finally starting to crack.

Just this week, the Prime Minister stood up at London Tech Week and told Apple, Google and the rest of the tech giants they have three months to stop children being sent and shown sexually explicit images, or face new laws. [12] Make no mistake, this is the bare minimum, years too late, and it does nothing about the misogyny underneath or the pressure crushing girls just as hard. And it only came at all because the politics finally forced his hand. But it is a start. Not long ago, they weren't even being told.

And in March this year, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for endangering children. [5] The same month, another jury hit Meta and YouTube with a verdict for the harm their design did to one young person, and there are now well over two thousand of these cases stacked up and waiting. [5][6] A court has already punched a hole in the legal shield these companies hid behind for twenty years, the one that let them say none of it was ever their fault. [7]

Here at home, Ofcom and the Information Commissioner have hauled the platforms in and put them on the clock over child safety. [8] A law passed in April finally gives the government the power to force restrictions on these platforms for under sixteens, and turned the school phone ban into actual law instead of a polite suggestion. [9] And when proper age checks came in on porn sites last summer, traffic from the UK to the biggest one dropped by nearly half almost overnight. [10] It was never impossible to make them act. It just took someone finally making them.

Grieving parents did that. Mothers and fathers who lost children to this and refused to go quietly, who stood outside courtrooms with photographs and would not be moved. [11] They are the reason the dam is cracking. Not the companies finding a conscience. Families who would not shut up.

So I keep coming back to my own three. Two boys and a girl. Which means I am frightened from both directions at once. Frightened of what this machine could make of my sons, of the boys it could turn them into if I look away long enough. And frightened of the world it is quietly building for my daughter, a world full of boys it already got to. The same boys those two girls in Fordingbridge sat next to in a classroom once.

None of them were born like this. Every single one of them was taught. And a lesson can be un-taught. Better still, it can be refused before it is ever taught, if enough of us stop handing our children to a machine that profits from breaking them.

I have not handed mine over to it, and I will not. Not until they are far older and far stronger than the pull of it. Not the boys. Not the girls. Not one more.

The receipts

1. A blank account set up as a teenage boy, watching only ordinary content, was served toxic content by the algorithm in roughly 23 minutes and "manfluencer" content in roughly 26 minutes, with YouTube Shorts pushing the higher volume of toxic material: Dublin City University Anti-Bullying Centre, "Recommending Toxicity," 2024 (reported by Euronews, 23 April 2024).

2. Andrew Tate being banned from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube in 2022, his Twitter/X account being reinstated in November 2022 after Elon Musk's takeover (the only mainstream platform to let him back, where he now has over 10 million followers), and the wider manosphere selling boys the idea that dominance over women is strength: Southern Poverty Law Center; Open Measures, 2025; Monash University (Monash Lens), December 2025.

3. The average age a child in England first sees pornography being 13, with 10% having seen it by age 9 and 27% by 11, much of it violent and served rather than searched for: Children's Commissioner for England, "A lot of it is actually just abuse," January 2023, and the follow-up survey, May 2025.

4. The statutory Relationships and Sex Education guidance: the 2019 framework that schools have worked from gave pornography minimal coverage, while updated RSHE guidance published in July 2025, which addresses pornography, misogyny and violence against women and girls, does not come into force until 1 September 2026: Department for Education; House of Commons Library; and the Children's Commissioner for England's analysis of the earlier guidance, 2023.

5. A New Mexico jury finding Meta liable for endangering children: reported by PBS NewsHour and others, March 2026.

6. A jury verdict against Meta and YouTube over the harm of their platform design to a young user (25 March 2026), and over 2,500 related actions pending in the US Adolescent Social Media Addiction litigation: Social Media Victims Law Center; Motley Rice litigation tracker, May 2026.

7. A US federal appeals court ruling in 2024 that serving a video to a 10-year-old via the algorithm was not protected by the long-standing liability shield (the Nylah Anderson "Blackout Challenge" case): US Third Circuit Court of Appeals, August 2024.

8. Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office jointly warning major platforms over child-protection failures and setting them a deadline to respond: reported March 2026.

9. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act receiving Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, giving the government power to restrict under-16s' social media use through secondary legislation, and making the school mobile phone ban statutory; the related consultation closed 26 May 2026: House of Commons Library; UK government (DSIT).

10. UK visitors to the largest pornography site dropping by around 47% in the fortnight after age-verification rules under the Online Safety Act took effect on 25 July 2025: Similarweb data, reported August 2025.

11. UK families who lost children joining wrongful death lawsuits against social media platforms in the US, and the case of Molly Russell being cited in that litigation: BBC News, 2026; Clyde & Co legal analysis, December 2024.

12. The Prime Minister telling technology companies at London Tech Week they have three months to introduce controls preventing children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images, or face new legislation: ITV News and BBC News, 8 June 2026.

13. Regulation lagging behind the pace of technology, with AI "nudify" and deepfake tools being used to generate non-consensual sexual images, including of children, faster than laws can keep up, and the EU delaying core high-risk AI rules to 2027: NBC News, February 2026; NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, 2026; reporting on the EU AI Act, March 2026.