During a committee meeting, someone asks if the club should refrain from posting images or videos of children on social media accounts because of Artificial Intelligence (AI) risks.
A discussion ensures, during which someone says “Are we letting fears take over? It’s important to show real people participating to attract new members. So long as we have parental consent to share images, what’s the problem?”
So, what is the problem?
AI technology is moving rapidly, creating both opportunities and risks for community sport clubs and their members, especially children and young people.
Here are some facts to inform your next committee discussion about the sharing of images and videos.
Increasing risks
For community sport clubs, taking and sharing images and videos of children and young people has always come with risk. This includes:
- Misuse, such as embarrassing moments being deliberately highlighted
- Online abuse, including bullying, harassment and threats
- Access by inappropriate audiences
- Unauthorised redistribution
- Children becoming more visible or identifiable online
- Grooming.
AI is increasing the risk that images and videos your club shares could be used in harmful ways. Consider the following:
- Widely available AI tools can quickly and easily manipulate imagery or create deepfakes.
- Once an image or video is posted publicly, it is becoming harder to control who can access it and what they might do with it.
- AI enhances the likelihood that identifying information, such as the club’s name, location, the time of events or people’s age, could be used to locate, humiliate, coerce or blackmail someone.
- Research from Adelaide University has found that AI was a factor in 1 in 4 instances of nonconsensual sharing of sexual images among young people.
- The eSafety Commissioner has seen an increase in reports of image-based abuse with images harvested from social media accounts and websites.
Digital platforms are now key part of communication in community clubs, and everyone loves photos and videos of children enjoying sport. Images can also be important to illustrate the welcoming and inclusive nature of your club, but sharing does carry increased risks.
Is one-off consent enough?
The capturing of parental consent for image, video and livestreams is often included in pre-season registrations. This is useful step for clubs and capturing consent on digital platforms sure beats signed and printed forms.
But consent is not the same as safety, and parents and carers may not necessarily aware of the risks outlined above.
Children and young people also deserve to have a say. Research by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in 2025 found that children and young people want to be asked more often if their personal information (which includes images) can be used and informed about how it will be used. Sport Integrity Australia research found that 36% of children and young people had witnessed spectators or other parents taking photos without their permission.
If photos and videos of members are posted regularly on your club’s digital channels, it could be a good idea to also have regular discussions around consent for this.
Does your safegaurding children and young people policy provide guidance?
Your sport’s safeguarding children and young people code of behaviour likely details the requirements to capture informed consent from children, parents and guardians for the use of images. It might provide guidance on what appropriate images are and the safe storage of images.
However, your current policies and codes of conduct were likely written before the recent and rapid expansion of AI apps and tools.
Policy change takes time. While implementing policies, you should critically assess the safest way to protect your members today.
What you can do
Discuss the following questions as a committee:
- Do we currently share images and videos of children and young people on digital platforms such as social media, livestreams, apps or websites?
- What is the purpose, benefit and risk?
- Are the images accessible to anyone?
- Is it necessary for images to be publicly accessible?
- Is identifying information visible right now on publicly accessible images?
- Who in our club has the authority to capture and publish images?
- What could we use instead of images or videos on our digital platforms?
Considerations to reduce the risks may include:
- Consider only publishing public images free from identifying information, meaning the images are zoomed out, backgrounds blurred and/or individual faces are not visible.
- Ensuring that images of children and young people are only shared on private platforms.
- Review and update the privacy settings on platforms to restrict unauthorised public access.
- Review old images on your digital platforms – can old images and videos be taken down?
- Ensure imagery taken by official club photographers stored on club approved devices or cloud software.
- Communicate your approach to parents, guardians and volunteers and remind them to seek consent from children, young people and parents before they take or share any images or videos.
- Consider what other imagery could be used on digital platforms to share information. Could graphics templates from sites such as Canva be used to limit original images needed?
- Ask your league, state or national organisation if they have content resources, including existing templates or approved imagery that you could use.
- If you use generative AI to create graphics for your digital platforms, re-consider the use of original images in this process.
Digital platforms have become key communication channels for community clubs. Sharing images and videos on these platforms can be a great way to celebrate and communicate with existing members and promote your club.
But in an era of rapid AI development, it is worth exploring if there are small changes you could make at your club to reduce the risks around sharing imagery and videos, particularly for children and young people.
Developed with support from the eSafety Commissioner.
