Principal’s Post on Empowering Young Women
Since 1935, Our Lady of Mercy Catholic College has held a legacy of instilling the values of leadership, excellence and service, nurturing confident young women. We empower our girls to make their make on society with confidence and compassion.
Safe on Social
Taken from Safe on Social by Kirra Pendergast
| Kirra Pendergast began her career in 1991 working on the foundational infrastructure of the early internet, specialising in the protocols, authentication systems, and security architecture that modern digital life depends on. By 1999 she was at VeriSign, contributing to the cryptographic trust systems that secured government, military, financial, and commercial transactions worldwide. Over the following decades Kirra led major identity, security, and online safety reforms across government and enterprise, later founding independent organisations including Safe on Social and Ctrl+Shft to address emerging technology facilitated harms. Today, her frameworks are used by more than 1,200 organisations across eight countries, and she serves as an expert advisor, witness, and media commentator on online safety, digital risk, and child protection. |
“Miss, Have You Heard of Omoggle?”
The question came from a Year 6 student. He said it the way children sometimes say things they suspect they shouldn’t know, half curious and half watching my face.
At first, I thought he had said Omegle, that older corner of the internet most of us hoped had been buried. But he repeated it slowly, with the patience children extend to adults who are not keeping up. Omoggle. Not Omegle. Something newer, and as I discovered over the following week, something altogether stranger.
We are entering a new phase of digital harm for children. Not because Omoggle is uniquely evil. It represents the collision of three forces that should never have been allowed to meet inside a child’s bedroom. AI-generated beauty standards, algorithmic social ranking, and a generation growing up inside what is becoming a comparison economy. Unlike the pressures most of us survived as teens, this one does not switch off.
I came of age in the era of the supermodel. We compared ourselves to Elle Macpherson and Cindy Crawford in whichever glossy magazines our mothers brought home. Even that quaint dose of unattainable beauty did extraordinary damage. Eating disorders, anxiety, perfectionism, and a generation of girls who came to believe that worth lived in the symmetry of a face.
That was before algorithms. Before livestreams. Before AI. Before, children carried, in their pockets, a permanent global comparison machine that woke when they did and slept only when they finally surrendered to exhaustion.
Omoggle is a livestream platform built around appearance ranking. A byproduct of what I call MANipulation (commonly known as Manosphere). Users enter what the culture calls “face battles.” There is anonymous video chat, AI facial analysis, attractiveness scoring, and the broader infrastructure of looksmaxxing, the belief that human worth can be optimised through appearance alone. The respectable end of it is skincare and fitness. The darker end is body dysmorphia, misogyny, racialised looks, hierarchies, humiliation culture, and a quiet dependency on the validation of strangers.
When I logged in, there were around eight thousand users online. The platform claims to be eighteen and over. It is also what is now called an AI slop app, built cheaply on mass-produced AI-generated content and designed to scale faster than any regulator can catch it. If a platform spreads through TikTok and gaming and meme culture, children will find it. When a Year 6 student tells me about it, I can be certain they already have.
Kids do not enter these spaces because they are vain. They enter because adolescence has always been a hunt for identity, belonging, and acceptance. What has changed is the scale, and the permanence. An adult sees a meme, a joke, a passing absurdity. Kids see, in the same moment, a verdict on whether they are attractive enough, popular enough, worthy of attention. It is developmental psychology. We have wired the most porous years of human identity into AI scoring and livestream judgement.
Parents – this is not a moment for panic. Kids do not need fear from us. They need informed adults.
If your child mentions Omoggle or looksmaxxing or face ratings, do not shame them. Do not mock them. Get curious otherwise they will slam a wall down faster than you can blink. In casual conversation, say you read about it, and ask what people like about it, how it makes them feel. Ask what happens to a user who gets no attention.
Long before we hand a child a smart device, we should be asking a bigger question. Have we helped them build a sense of self strong enough to survive an internet designed around comparison?
If they already have a device we need to be more curious and tune in. Create that safe space for them to speak up about anything, anytime and model a family connection culture around that.
The kids most vulnerable online are usually the lonely ones, the anxious ones, the kids desperate to belong, the kids quietly wondering whether they are enough.
A child’s sense of self is not built through praise alone. It grows when a child feels genuinely useful inside a family, when they develop skills that have nothing to do with appearance, when the adults in their life praise their courage and kindness and curiosity rather than their performance. It grows through boredom and creativity, through nature and music, through the slow lessons of failing and trying again. Sport matters. Hobbies matter. Sleep matters. Unstructured play matters. So does letting kids see adults who are not constantly performing themselves online.
The greatest protection we can give a child online is not surveillance software. It is a sense of self that does not collapse the moment a stranger online ranks them, ignores them, or tells them they are not enough.