A campaign to help youngsters use the internet safely has been launched in north Wales.

Get Safe Online’s ‘Safer Kids’ offers unbiased, factual and easy-to-understand information on online safety in the UK.

Advice for this campaign includes:

• Sitting down and talking regularly with your child about their online activities and getting them to show you what they’re doing.

• Steering your child towards safe searching, websites and apps. Checking what they’re watching and/or sharing on sites like YouTube and TikTok.

• Familiarising yourself with new game and social media trends, especially those attracting negative publicity because they may be violent, encourage gambling or leave the way open for messaging random strangers, enabling potential grooming or other types of coercion.

• Underestimating the part social media and messaging apps play in your child’s life, and how what they experience online can make them feel.

• Making sure your child doesn’t access games, apps etc. for which they’re underage.

• Setting up parental control software and apps on computers, mobile devices and games consoles.

• Warning your child about confidential information, personal details and images/video about themselves or others they share in posts, profiles, messages and chats.

• Keeping an eye on your child’s online activities and knowing how to recognise signs of something not being right.

Tony Neate, Get Safe Online CEO said: “The internet has so many benefits for our children; using it to support their studies, interact with their friends and even shop.

“However, it’s really important we teach them to go online safely. Our campaign focuses on key advice to help children use the online world in a respectful, safe and secure way.” Get Safe Online has been commissioned North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner Andy Dunbobbin and North Wales Police. Mr Dunbobbin said: “Over the summer holidays, parents and guardians can naturally be busy juggling a job, family and home, and we sometimes leave children to their own devices, on their own devices.

“But we can all take a few simple steps to ensure families are using the internet safely and I would urge all people looking after children to follow this advice from Get Safe Online, a service I am proud to commission as part of my plan to see a north Wales where crime is further reduced and where people are kept as safe as possible.”

Visit the Get Safe Online website for more information.