But nobody is saying keeping photos private removes every possible risk, or that posting a photo means something bad will definitely happen.
It simply gives strangers another source of identifiable images of your child that they can copy and manipulate. If those photos weren’t publicly available, they couldn’t obtain them from your social media.
And I think you’re massively overestimating people’s ability to distinguish fake content from real content. Ofcom found that while 69% of adults said they were confident they could identify misinformation, only 22% could correctly identify the signs of a genuine social media post without making mistakes. Their research on deepfakes found only 9% of adults felt confident they could identify one. A 2024 study of more than 86,000 people found people identified AI images correctly only around 53% of the time, essentially no better than randomly flipping a coin.
Technology is also becoming more realistic, not less.
I also don’t think there’s any basis for suggesting AI child sexual abuse material makes real children safer because offenders can use that instead of grooming them. Abuse isn’t a fixed amount of demand that can simply be diverted into AI. Fake sexual images of a real child can themselves be used to humiliate, bully, threaten or exploit that child.
Parents can absolutely look at the risk and decide they’re still comfortable sharing photos. That’s a personal judgement and up to you, of course. But saying posting identifiable photos publicly creates no additional risk at all, or might actually protect children from grooming(!), is a very different claim and I don’t think the evidence supports it.