In 2020, young people were dealing with more negative experiences in the digital world than in previous years. Some of the ups and downs in this digital rollercoaster include accidentally spending money (up by 11 percentage points), coming across sexual content that made them feel uncomfortable (up 8 percentage points), getting contacted by strangers, and receiving scary or troubling stuff (both up 7 percentage points).

Take Oscar for example.¹ A participant in the 2023 Ofcom survey, Oscar recently fell out with one of his close friends, with the drama unfolding on Snapchat and Instagram. A boy in his year repeatedly live-streamed insults and abusive comments about Oscar and his friends. He would ‘invite’ Oscar into the live stream video, so that he and Oscar would be live-streamed side-by-side in a split screen format, and continue to insult him. Oscar also had a TikTok account but deleted it because he stumbled upon some iffy content which he didn’t like.