Loves shopping and is into fashion and beauty. She plays football and lots of Roblox. A fan of Frank Ocean and Sabrina Carpenter.

This profile was shown the least disturbing content, but on the first day, a search for “leopard print” on Instagram, one of Aisha’s interests, immediately led to scantily-clad women in suggestive poses.

The For You page was then suggesting more of these types of images several days later despite never searching for it again.

While these were not explicit, they suggested they would lead the user to more explicit content if they clicked through.

On day two, after just 10 minutes of scrolling altogether on TikTok, Aisha was shown a gaming video acting out a school shooting with characters hiding in the bathroom and sounds of a gun being fired.

Spends most of her time on TikTok, loves hauls and Get Ready With Me (GRWM) content. She enjoys gaming, especially Roblox, and is also a fan of artists like SZA and Sabrina Carpenter.

After 30 minutes of scrolling on TikTok, this profile was regularly exposed to upsetting graphic descriptions of real-life murder cases and attacks with wording like “dragged from her house and beaten to death”.

There was a video of a woman talking about the abuse a five-year-old girl suffered at the hands of her father, and another from a tabloid newspaper’s profile, describing a “brutal attack” on an autistic child.

Maya was also shown videos about sick children and poor mental health.

On one occasion, an animated video said “If it’s a blue, all your friends hate you”, followed by the symbol turning blue.

Following many of the most upsetting videos, TikTok offered clickable searches, like: “Actual raw footage video”, “Her last moment alive” and “Murder caught on camera”.

There was also a video of a woman (who you can’t see) screaming and shouting swear words.

On Instagram this user was shown some sexually-suggestive content.

Goes to the gym a lot, likes doing weights. Enjoys gaming, plays Destiny 2, Block Blast and Witcher. Loves music and is really into drumming.

Within 20 minutes of scrolling, a video appeared on YouTube reviewing different weapons and how they perform on the human body. “Worst Weapons” used manikins to show the effect of knives and bullets.

This profile was by far the most concerning of the three male teenagers we created, being shown videos covering subjects like “how to hide a dead body” on TikTok, hiding drugs from police officers, and what looked like [or was meant to look like] real footage of a man hitting a woman on YouTube.

From the off, the language this profile was exposed to was aggressive and full of swear words.

Towards the end of the week, this profile also seemed to start featuring more and more females either dancing or posing in suggestive ways on TikTok. They all had a similar appearance in terms of body shape and looks, with one post encouraging the profile to choose whether they prefer “the girl or the car” they were featured alongside.

His favourite thing is gaming – he enjoys Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty. He is also into music like Snoop Dog and Eminem, and writes songs himself.

As a fictional gamer, Kai’s profile generated a lot of screengrabs from different well-known video games.

In particular, the footage from the first-person shooter games were graphic and aggressive. Close-up stabbings with blood spurting out of opponents was a regular occurrence on YouTube.

This profile also took us into the realm of mysterious audio stories about shocking subjects, including a mocked-up phone call on TikTok from a father telling his daughter to lock herself in her room because “your mum wants to kill you”.

Scrolling this account also showed a TikTok tutorial video of “how to steal” the metal statue from the front of an expensive car.

Loves football, he plays at school and does Fantasy Football. He enjoys gaming, mainly FC25 and Among Us.

This account was probably the least concerning of the three boys in terms of what it was exposed to, but did see content that seemed to come out of the blue.

There was another knife advert/review on YouTube, comparing blades of differing prices with how they cut an orange.

There was also an “anger level monitor”, where the user was encouraged to do a test and see how angry they are.