What the f*ck is happening to humanity?

Ironjaw Cybersecurity · Digital Safety · Opinion Credit: Danny Bradburn & Malwarebytes — for pulling this into the light.

Deep-fakes and sextortion aren't coming. They're already here — and your children's faces are the raw material.

sextortion - child holding phone covering face

I'm going to say something I mean with every fiber of my being: if this doesn't make your stomach turn, if it doesn't make you want to throw your phone across the room — I genuinely don't know what's left for you. Go get help. Because what I'm about to lay out is not a warning about some distant future. This is happening right now, to real children, in real time. And every one of us who has ever posted a photo of a kid online is complicit in building the infrastructure that makes it possible.

This isn't "alarming." Alarming is the word you use when the check engine light comes on. This is the modern-day Hiroshima — a weapon we giftwrapped and handed to the darkest corners of the internet, then walked away from, telling ourselves it would never be turned on us.

It has been turned on us. On our daughters, specifically.

The numbers. Sit with them.

16,000+ sextortion complaints filed with the FBI in just the first half of 2021. $8 million+ in documented losses in that same six-month window. 2× — AI-generated child sexual abuse material reports doubled year over year by November 2025. 94% of those victims are girls. Including infants.

June 2023, the FBI warned the playbook had shifted: attackers were using ordinary social media photos to create fake explicit images and extort minors."

— FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, PSA230605

Ordinary. Social. Media. Photos. The birthday shot. The first day of school. The family vacation. Christmas morning. To the people doing this, that's not a memory — it's raw material. They process it, they weaponize it, and they use it to destroy lives.

"In November 2025, IWF reports of AI-generated CSAM had more than doubled year over year, rising from 199 to 426. Girls accounted for 94% of victims. Reported cases included children ranging from newborns to two-year-olds."

— Internet Watch Foundation, via The Guardian

Newborns. Not teenagers. Not toddlers. Newborns. And we are still out here posting hospital photos captioned "She's here!" with a location tag.

What's coming next — and it's worse.

Emoji blocking new born face, mother smiling & taking selfie of them both

"The concern is that this process could soon become automated, allowing criminals to scrape names and photos from school websites and social media platforms at scale."

— Malwarebytes, 2025

Let me translate that from security-speak into plain English. Automated pipelines. Bots running around the clock, scraping your kid's face from the school sports roster, cross-referencing their name from the yearbook PDF someone uploaded to the district website, generating material in industrial volume. No human involvement required. No brakes on the system.

blurred photo - kids playing soccer

This isn't theoretical. The infrastructure exists. The only question is how fast it scales — and it will scale, because nothing in the current regulatory or platform landscape is going to stop it in time.

So what's my excuse? What's yours?

I've traveled the world. A lot. And the story I've been telling myself — the one I've repeated so many times I started to believe it — is that Instagram is how I stay connected with people I've met along the way. People from countries I may never return to. Faces I genuinely care about, scattered across every continent.

That's been my justification. And I bet it sounds familiar, because almost everyone has one.

Maybe yours is different. Maybe it's "I only follow people I know." Maybe it's "my account is private." Maybe it's "I just use it to keep up with family." We all have a story. A reason that feels just real enough to keep us from deleting the app.

But here's the question I've started asking myself — and I want you to ask it too:

What is your justification actually worth? And what is it costing someone who never got a vote?

My "connection" with people across the world doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists on a platform that profits from engagement, has repeatedly chosen growth over safety, and has built the exact ecosystem these criminals exploit. Every time I open the app, I'm feeding the machine. I can't keep pretending my use case is somehow separate from the damage the platform enables.

I don't have children of my own. But I have nieces. Nephews. Siblings whose kids I love as my own. And to sit here — knowing what I know, doing this work every day — and still rationalize staying on these platforms? That's not a grey area. That's a choice. And it's the wrong one.

What you can actually do — today.

Stop posting identifiable photos of children on public platforms. Sports teams, school events, birthday parties, beach trips — all of it. The exposure isn't worth the likes.

"Private" on Meta is still Meta's data. A locked Instagram account is not a safe one.

Move family photo sharing somewhere built for it. Tinybeans and FamilyAlbum exist specifically for sharing with people you actually trust — not an algorithm optimizing for engagement.

Ditch WhatsApp for Signal. I have personally lost all faith in Meta. Signal is open-source, genuinely end-to-end encrypted, and its business model is not built on harvesting your life.

Messaging Apps Signal vs Whatsapp

Talk to your kids' schools about their photo and media policies. Ask who has access to images on their public websites. Push back — because the answer is almost never good enough.

Delete the apps.