Social media sites were mentioned thousands of times during calls with Childline last year, as ITV News’ Philip Sime reports
Words by ITV News Senior UK Producer Liz Little
TikTok was the most-mentioned social media platform during counselling sessions with Childline over the last year, according to new data shared exclusively with ITV News.
The first-of-its-kind analysis by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) looked at the number of times a range of platforms and apps were discussed by young people – with the most common concerns being mental health, online sexual abuse and exploitation.
Between April 2025 and March 2026, TikTok was mentioned 1,781 times during the sessions – an average of five times a day and a 37% rise on the previous year.
Other top platforms mentioned include Snapchat with 1,106 mentions, Instagram with 569 mentions, Roblox with 550 mentions and YouTube with 530 mentions.
NSPCC CEO, Chris Sherwood, described the results as “concerning but unsurprising” and further evidence to social media giants “of their failures to give children safe and healthy experiences online.”
It’s such safety failures which led to ‘Kate’ – whose identity we are protecting – discovering that her 12-year-old daughter had been groomed by a paedophile online.
After seeing suspicious notifications on her daughter’s iPad, Kate went through her TikTok account and discovered “horrendous” messages.
“I started scrolling and scrolling and realised that there was something really bad that had happened. She’d been exposed to just dreadful, dreadful things.”
Despite having parental controls on her daughter’s device, the man – posing as a teenager – was able to send indecent messages on TikTok before moving their conversation to Discord. There, an intense period of online sexual abuse lasted for 11 days.
Kate told ITV News: “He sent her a message saying, show me your p****. And she replied, ‘I haven’t got a cat, I’ve got a dog’ – because that’s how innocent she was, how naive she was.”
“And sometimes I just wonder, when will it dawn on her? When will she realise that she was completely exploited?”
Kate tells ITV News the impact on her daughter has been long-lasting.
“She’s wary of adults, I think she’s particularly wary of men and possibly more mistrusting.”
The damage, she says, has also been widespread.
“The grief and the sadness that lives in me now because of what she saw, but what he did to her as well, it’s absolutely sickening.”
Kate is calling on social media platforms to improve their safety features and hopes that, by speaking out, she will save another family from enduring the same trauma.
“I just feel like all these different social media platforms, they’re a playground for paedophiles at the moment.”
“It’s happening all the time. And we need to stand up and say, enough is enough. We’ve got to find a way to protect our children. It shouldn’t be happening.”
“It shouldn’t be about the greed of these social media platforms – because they have got the technology to police this and to protect our children.”
Earlier this year, the government announced a social media ban for under-16s in the UK. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham has backed his predecessor’s plan.
But some, including Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics, Sonia Livingstone, question whether a complete ban is the answer.
Professor Livingstone told ITV News: “A ban, pure and simple, takes something from children and it doesn’t really provide them with anything better.”
“We need parents and children to be aware of the kinds of risks that occur. But what we really what we need is to step up the level of regulation so that these risks don’t occur in the first place.”
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A government spokesperson, responding to the analysis, told ITV News: “These findings are a stark reminder of why we’re taking bold action to give children a safer, healthier childhood.”
“That’s why we’re banning social media platforms from offering their services to under-16s from next Spring and putting in wider protections to give kids their childhoods back. We’re also going further by cracking down on harmful functions like livestreaming and stranger communication and AI chatbots that put children’s safety at risk.
“Platforms already have a legal duty to protect children from harmful material, including pornography, violent and abusive online content, and Ofcom has our full backing to take action where necessary.”
TikTok told ITV News: “Teen accounts on TikTok have more than 50 preset privacy and safety features from the moment they join, and we use the latest technology to monitor and remove any content that attempts to exploit or harm young people. We disagree with the misleading way this data has been presented.”
A Discord spokesperson said: “Discord is a communications platform built to connect people around playing games. Our safety systems combine advanced technology and human-led investigations, alongside user reports to help identify accounts or spaces engaged in harmful activity.
“We take a proactive approach to combatting bad actors who seek to abuse our service and continuously invest in improving our efforts.
“Discord requires all users to be at least 13 to use our platform and we believe nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users.
“We’ve built a suite of protections for teen users that are now the default experience for all UK users, including sensitive content filters, safety alerts on unfamiliar senders, limited visibility to content of message requests, and enhanced privacy settings.
“We also provide teen users and their parents and guardians with important privacy and safety tools, including Teen Safety Assist and our Family Center.”
Snapchat told ITV News: “Snapchat was designed to be different to other platforms, with no open newsfeed or live stream, and public content is moderated to help limit the virality of potentially harmful content.
“While we are encouraged to see the number of Snapchat mentions in calls to Childline consistently drop year on year, the critical work to help keep Snapchatters safe never stops. Earlier this year, we committed to introducing strong age checks for all UK Snapchatters, and we will continue to work with the NSPCC and other NGOs to support young people’s safety.”
Meta, which owns Instagram, failed to respond to ITV News’ request for comment. Roblox and YouTube also declined to comment.
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