Lisa Nandy says government will introduce legislation after talks end without breakthrough

Apple and Google will be forced to block explicit images on children’s smartphones by law in the UK after talks failed to produce a breakthrough, the government has said.

The legislation commitment puts ministers on a collision course with two of the biggest players in Silicon Valley, months after the government announced a social media ban for under-16s.

Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or ‘nudified’ content easier to produce

Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.

The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or “faked” in some way, including with AI and nudification tools.

Companies must ensure people know when they are interacting with artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look real

From apparently conspiring to steal elections to abusing staff or performing embarrassing dance moves, the last few years have seen plenty of fake content made about politicians intended to malign its targets and mislead the public.

Now EU rules aim to stem the flood of this deceptive content: starting from Sunday, artificially generated images, audio and text designed to look authentic must be labelled.

Ofcom concerned TikTok’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some exposed to posts on suicide, self-harm and pornography

TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced.

The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act.

Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers

The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.

Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.

All the young people the Guardian spoke to disagreed with aspects of the government’s proposed block

Sixteen- and 17-year-olds in Britain are to be encouraged to observe a midnight to 6am social media curfew but will be able to opt out by changing their account settings.

From next spring, they will be urged to refrain from using certain apps, with the block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden.

As imaging tools become more sophisticated, online predators are using images of children to make extreme pornography

• UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears

The two photos started out as typical teenage selfies: looking into the mirror, fully clothed. But once online predators had got hold of those pictures and ran them through an AI imaging tool, they had become the basis for extreme pornography videos.

These examples come from the Report Remove service, which allows children who have had explicit pictures of themselves distributed without their consent to flag the image confidentially and have it blocked or taken down from social media. Due to breakthroughs in AI, and the wide availability of AI models and nudification apps, some under-18s are becoming victims without even being in contact with criminals.