techUK supports Safer Internet Day 2025

techUK is pleased to support #SaferInternetDay2025 which is celebrating with the theme ‘‘Too good to be true? Protecting yourself and others from scams online’. 

Safer Internet Day creates a welcome opportunity to celebrate the benefits of technology while informing a national conversation around how children, young people and adults can go about their online lives responsibly, respectfully and critically. 

techUK members are creating the platforms and services which enable families and young people to connect, collaborate and form a sense of community. With this online opportunity comes inevitable risk from bad actors which makes it even more important for tech companies to develop solutions to address deepfakes and the impact of generative AI to combat scams online.

Safer Internet Day marks a useful day to showcase the range of different initiatives which are taking place across the tech sector and beyond. techUK members are supporting in a range of ways. To name a few: 

• TikTok has started to automatically label AI-generated content on its platform, ensuring that the context behind a video is clear to viewers, a tool it has since expanded to also cover content created on some other platforms and subsequently re-shared, and which has since been used by over 37 million creators.   

• Google has enhanced its search functions to remove non-consensual, sexually-explicit deepfakes and demote websites hosting high volumes of removed content, whilst also making it easier for victims to request the removal of sexually explicit deepfake content and working to reduce the prominence of such content in search results. Updates made in the past year have reduced exposure to explicit image results on these types of queries by over 70%. 

• Meta has expanded a first-of-its-kind information sharing partnership with banks. The Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (FIRE) programme allows banks to share intelligence with Meta directly to combat scams on their platforms. The early stage of this pilot has already led Meta to take action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, with approximately 20,000 accounts removed based on data shared. They are continuing to onboard more banks and strengthen their fraud detection capabilities, creating a safer digital environment for users in the UK and globally. 

As we look ahead to the rest of 2025 and the implementation of the Online Safety Act, techUK and its members will continue to create solutions which support safe online experiences through making changes to systems and advancing safety initiatives for society.

For those looking to support the Day, there is still time to get involved, and look here to find a social media toolkit, top tips and quizzes, educational resources for all ages, as well as where to register as a supporter.  Look out for research to be published on 11th Feb on children and online scams.