The IWF's Think Before You Share campaign offers free help, the TALK guide for parents, and Report Remove for under-18s in the UK whose intimate images have...

Content note: This post discusses non-consensual sharing of intimate images, pressure to share, and sextortion affecting young people. If a young person needs help right now, Childline is free on 0800 1111, 24 hours. To report and remove images, visit childline.org.uk/report-remove.

Images of young people are being shared online without their consent every day. Sometimes through sextortion, the threat-and-blackmail cycle we have written about before. Sometimes through peer pressure and coercion. Sometimes by people who simply don't stop to consider the human being in the picture before they hit send. A new IWF campaign, Think Before You Share, gives everyone in this conversation, teenagers, parents, and educators, a clear, practical place to land.

What is Think Before You Share?

Think Before You Share is a campaign from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Europe's largest hotline dedicated to finding and removing child sexual abuse material online. It provides confidential help, practical resources, and direct pathways to image removal for young people whose intimate images have been shared without their consent.

The campaign is structured around three audiences, teenagers, parents and carers, and educators, each with tailored guidance, conversation resources, and direct links to the services that can actually help. Visit thinkbeforeyoushare.org →

The campaign is not an awareness exercise. It is a service gateway, designed to move young people from panic to action, and parents from concern to conversation, as quickly as possible. The IWF knows from its own data that time matters: images spread rapidly once shared, and the sooner a young person knows what to do, the better the outcome.

Three audiences. Three distinct needs.

🧑 Teenagers. Clear, non-judgmental guidance for young people who are being pressured to share images, who have already shared and regret it, or whose images are now circulating without their consent. Direct links to Report Remove, the free IWF tool that can get images taken down. Advice on what to say to friends who are sharing other people's images.

🏠 Parents & Carers, A free downloadable TALK guide, a practical tool for starting the conversation at home before something goes wrong. Guidance on what to do and how to respond calmly if a child discloses that their images have been shared. Links to Childline, Samaritans, and Young Minds for ongoing emotional support.

🎓 Educators. Classroom-ready resources for teachers and safeguarding leads who want to start a conversation with students. Guidance on how to respond when a pupil discloses or when a situation is discovered. Designed to be used proactively, before an incident, not only after.

Why this campaign is needed right now

The non-consensual sharing of intimate images involving young people is not a niche or edge-case problem. IWF's own Report Remove service processed 1,894 reports in 2025, a 66% increase on the previous year, and confirmed child sexual abuse imagery on 1,175 of those reports. Of those, 34% involved some form of sextortion. 98% of sextortion victims who reported were boys aged 14–17.

But sextortion is only one pathway. Images are also shared as acts of humiliation, as social currency among peer groups, through manipulation by someone a young person trusted, or through AI-generated deepfakes created from publicly available photos. The IWF's Harm Without Limits report documented 8,029 AI-generated child sexual abuse images and videos in 2025 alone, a 14% increase on the year before.

The connecting thread across all of these harms is that young people rarely know what to do when it happens. They fear judgment, feel shame, assume nothing can be done, or don't know that services like Report Remove exist. Think Before You Share is designed to address exactly that gap, to put the practical pathway in front of young people and the adults around them, in language that is honest and accessible rather than clinical and frightening.

"If you're sending pics, make sure you think before you share. And remember, if someone has shared your pics, they're in the wrong, so don't be afraid to ask for help."

. Think Before You Share, IWF campaign

On the legal position: sharing nude photos or videos of anyone under 18, even images created by AI, even images the young person originally shared themselves, is illegal in the UK under the Protection of Children Act 1978 and the Online Safety Act 2023. Think Before You Share is explicit about this, and framed in a way that empowers young people with the fact rather than weaponising it against them.

The TALK guide, for parents who don't know where to start

One of the most practical resources the campaign offers is the IWF's free TALK guide, a downloadable PDF designed to help parents open the conversation at home. The barrier for most parents isn't willingness to talk; it's not knowing how to start without making the conversation feel like an accusation or a warning.

Starting the conversation, approaches that work

These are adapted from the kinds of openers the TALK guide recommends, natural, non-alarmist, focused on making sure your child knows they have a safe adult to come to.

"I saw something online today about young people being pressured into sharing photos. It made me think, if something like that ever happened to you, or to anyone you know, I want you to know you can always come to me. My first reaction would be to help, not to be angry."

"Have you heard of apps or sites where people can report images of themselves to get them taken down? It's called Report Remove, it's free and run by Childline. It's worth knowing it exists."

"I'm not trying to spy on you or make you feel like you've done something wrong. I just want you to know that if someone pressures you for a photo online, especially someone you only know online, you don't owe them anything, and I'm always here."

Download the full TALK guide at thinkbeforeyoushare.org, free, no registration required.

What platforms and apps must do, and where they are failing

Think Before You Share exists because the environments where this harm happens, social platforms, messaging apps, gaming platforms with chat, are not doing enough to detect and prevent it at source. The campaign is essential. It is also, at some level, a response to a failure of infrastructure.

1. Detect pressure and coercion in real time. The language of sextortion, the escalating demands, the threat framing, the panic-inducing countdown, is detectable before a victim pays or a crisis escalates. Most platforms have no infrastructure to identify it.

2. Identify AI-generated intimate imagery before it circulates. Nudify app output and AI-generated CSAM have detectable forensic signatures. Platforms that receive and distribute this content without any detection layer are failing their users and the law.

3. Surface emotional distress signals in at-risk users. The period immediately after a sextortion threat, when a young person is most at risk, leaves visible signals in their own messages. Fear, panic, withdrawal, and isolation are detectable. Platforms can intervene.

4. Proactively prevent image circulation, not just reactively remove. UNICEF called explicitly for platforms to prevent the spread of non-consensual imagery before it reaches other users, not just respond to reports after the fact. Detection at upload is possible. Most platforms have not built it.

Under the UK Online Safety Act, platforms have legal duties to identify, remove, and prevent the spread of intimate image abuse content involving both adults and children. For children specifically, the duty of care is heightened. Think Before You Share is a resource for the moment after harm has occurred. The goal must be to move detection to the moment before.

How Tuteliq supports the same mission, at platform level

Think Before You Share works at the human level, giving individuals the knowledge and tools to respond. Tuteliq works at the infrastructure level, giving platforms the detection capability to identify and interrupt harm before it reaches the point where a teenager needs to know what a report removal service is.

Four detection layers map directly to the harm pathways Think Before You Share was built to address, each operating in real time, across text, image, voice, and video.

  • Sextortion Pattern Detection. Detects the language of financial sextortion and image-based coercion: threat escalation, blackmail framing, payment demands, AI-assisted scripts. Returns confidence score, risk level, and recommended action. detect_coercive_control
  • Grooming and Pressure Detection. Identifies the early-stage manipulation that precedes image coercion: trust-building with a minor, requests to move to private channels, escalating intimacy, and false reciprocity patterns. detect_grooming
  • Synthetic Image Detection, A 6-signal forensic pipeline for AI-generated and manipulated imagery. Identifies nudify app output and AI-generated CSAM before it circulates, classifying into confirmed_synthetic, suspected_synthetic, or confirmed_authentic.
  • Emotional Distress Monitoring. Analyses a user's own messages for fear, panic, withdrawal, and isolation indicators, the signals that appear in the critical window after a threat is made and before a young person has found an adult to tell. analyze_emotions

For young people. Report Remove

If images have been shared, they can be removed. Free. Confidential. Now.

Report Remove is the IWF's free service, accessible via Childline, that allows children under 18 in the UK to report sexual or intimate imagery of themselves. Once reported, analysts work to block and remove the content from the open web. It can also act proactively to prevent images from spreading before they do.

This is the most important practical tool available to a young person in this situation. The single most useful thing a parent, teacher, or platform can do is make sure children know it exists before they need it. Visit childline.org.uk/report-remove or go directly to thinkbeforeyoushare.org.

You are not in trouble. You are not to blame. Help is here.

Support is available right now

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Sources: Think Before You Share, IWF campaign, April 2026 · IWF Report Remove data 2025 · IWF Harm Without Limits 2026 · UNICEF Disrupting Harm Phase 2, February 2026. Campaign quote drawn directly from thinkbeforeyoushare.org/teenagers.

Detection at the moment of upload, not after circulation

The harm Think Before You Share responds to doesn't have to reach crisis point. Nudify app output and non-consensual intimate imagery have detectable forensic signatures, AI-generated images carry pixel-level and metadata traces that Tuteliq's synthetic image detection pipeline identifies before content circulates further. Platforms that deploy this infrastructure aren't just reacting to reports: they are intercepting the spread of an image in the moments after it is uploaded, before it reaches a second inbox, a group chat, or a public page. That gap, between creation and circulation, is where detection matters most. A young person who knows about Think Before You Share still has to live with images being shared. A platform that detects and blocks synthetic intimate imagery at upload may mean they never have to.

Synthetic Content Detection API

Tuteliq's Synthetic Content Detection endpoint provides forensic analysis across four modalities through a single API surface, purpose-built for platforms that need to identify AI-generated and manipulated media before it spreads.

  • Image Forensics, POST /api/v1/safety/synthetic-content/image runs a 6-signal pixel-level analysis for AI-generated faces, deepfakes, nudify app output, and diffusion-model artifacts (Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion). Returns a classification of confirmed_synthetic, suspected_synthetic, or confirmed_authentic with confidence scores.
  • Text Detection, POST /api/v1/safety/synthetic-content identifies LLM-generated text, including AI-assisted grooming scripts, sextortion templates, and synthetic impersonation messages.
  • Voice Clone Detection, POST /api/v1/safety/synthetic-content/audio detects AI-cloned voices and synthetic speech via EU-hosted Whisper transcription combined with synthetic pattern analysis.
  • Deepfake Video Analysis, POST /api/v1/safety/synthetic-content/video performs frame-by-frame forensic checks for face consistency, temporal artifacts, and AI manipulation signatures.

Synthetic CSAM is automatically escalated to severity 1.0 (critical) with immediate intervention recommended, zero tolerance, zero delay. Detection runs in real time, returns a structured response with is_synthetic, confidence, detected_signals, and recommended_action, and integrates directly into upload pipelines, moderation queues, and incident reporting.

See the full API reference for request/response schemas, credit costs, and integration examples.

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