Kaspersky Warns South African Children Face Grooming and AI Abuse on WhatsApp and YouTube

On September 30, 2026, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky released data showing that WhatsApp and YouTube dominate the time South African children spend on the most popular apps, with WhatsApp accounting for 33.8 percent of monitored usage during the first eight months of 2026, followed by YouTube at 26.8 percent, TikTok at 7.8 percent and Instagram at 6.8 percent. Kaspersky warned that these platforms can expose young users to grooming, cyberbullying and emerging AI-related abuse, noting that platforms allowing children to communicate directly with others expose them to strangers who may use deception and manipulation to gain trust, obtain personal images or videos, arrange meetings, blackmail them or draw them into harmful or illegal activities. The company identified online grooming, phishing, cyberbullying and sextortion as key risks.

Offenders target children where they spend their time, on messaging and video platforms that lack real-time detection of escalating coercion. Guardii's anti-grooming and anti-sextortion detection intercepts these specific harms as they occur: sustained targeting across multiple messages, gradual normalization of sexual language, requests for images framed as trust-building, and financial or image-based extortion each trigger alerts calibrated to the seriousness of the threat, reporting the shape and pattern of the conversation rather than exposing its content. That enables a parent, school counsellor or law enforcement contact to intervene before blackmail succeeds, a meeting is arranged or explicit material changes hands, detecting threat patterns rather than requiring an adult to read every exchange a child conducts.