People harvest school photos, then use them against the school
The eSafety Commissioner counted more than 100 reports in three months. Almost every one started with imagery taken from a school's own social media account or website.
What eSafety counted, January to March 2026
The advisory of 28 July 2026 reports the numbers directly: “eSafety has seen a rise in reports involving school-related image misuse.” In one quarter the Commissioner received more than 100 reports about anonymous accounts targeting schools and school staff. “Almost all involved imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites.”
Many of those reports came through the Adult Cyber Abuse Scheme, which sets a high bar. eSafety records that schools reached for it because “the content was considered seriously harmful, even where it did not involve intimate imagery”. Over the same period the Commissioner saw “twice as many reports from under-18s about digitally altered intimate images” as the year before.
This is the newest evidence on this site, it comes from the regulator rather than a researcher, and it counts Australian schools in the current year.
What the accounts do with the photos
Most of the material turned up on TikTok and Instagram. “It included AI-generated dance videos and face swaps, as well as memes using staff photographs and fabricated stories about teachers, principals and other school staff.”
Some accounts borrow the school's own identity to look official: “Some accounts use a school name, nickname or logo to attract followers and appear legitimate.” Australian media reported anonymous TikTok accounts that used staff headshots to build fake videos and teacher ratings, and eSafety notes the reach those accounts got: “Many posts were open to comments and several accounts attracted hundreds of followers.”
Fabrication does not soften the harm. eSafety puts it plainly: “Even fake content can have a real impact on the person targeted.”
Who runs them
Often the school's own students, current or former. Sometimes people with no connection to the school at all. eSafety records both, and warns that the second group follows the photos rather than the community: overseas media reports show “criminals have taken student photos from school websites and used AI to create sexually explicit images for a school extortion attempt”. The Commissioner draws the conclusion for us: “These are well-researched and planned forms of blackmail, demonstrating why public images may attract people with no connection to the school.”
Where it ends up
An ordinary photo is enough. eSafety describes how “an ordinary photograph where a person appears fully clothed can be altered, or nudified, to create fake sexual material”. The school photo does not need to be unusual, revealing or careless. It needs to be public and it needs to show a face clearly, which is what a school photo does by design.
From there it stops being one person's problem. “The effect can spread across the school and become a critical online incident.” Staff lose confidence at work, students copy what they see, and the original account keeps circulating after somebody reports it.
Where the material is not sexual, eSafety says it “may fall outside the legal criteria” that lets the Commissioner compel a takedown. A fake teacher-rating video built from a staff headshot can be humiliating, defamatory and entirely outside the removal powers. That makes the public setting the only real control anybody has.
Why the public setting is the part that can change
Every account in those reports needed a source photo it could reach without logging in. An audit of every NSW government school found 1,780 running public Facebook Pages, with 637,818 students between them, because NSW Department of Education policy requires school accounts to stay open. A school cannot close the door on the harvesters while that instruction stands.
The archive matters too. A school that stops posting today leaves years of identifiable photos publicly readable, and the accounts in eSafety's reports draw on exactly that back catalogue.
The eSafety advisory tells schools to move student imagery into “a closed or restricted space”. The two documents sit side by side here, and the three asks that resolve the conflict are here.
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