KIRRA PENDERGAST
Online Safety Strategist.
Speaker.
Educator. Advisor.
Writer.
Podcaster.
Big Tech BS Slayer.
Not soft. Not soothing. And definitely not safe for complacency.
@thisiskirra on Substack is where I write what can’t be said in keynotes or condensed into news grabs. I write about the digital chaos quietly reshaping our lives, our laws, and our kids’ sense of self.
I cover what most won’t touch, surveillance dressed as self-care, online safety, tech-washed wellness apps that bleed privacy for profit. I bring lived experience, legal insight, and frontline knowledge from the boardrooms, classrooms, and courtrooms I work in.
If you're tired of PR-massaged updates and tech utopia fluff, this is your intel.
Subscribe if you’re ready to stop being a user and start understanding what’s being used.
The briefing that platforms hope you ignore.
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What if the worst thing that ever happened to you became the most important thing you ever built?
Orchestrated. Cold. Precise. The person who broke her wasn’t a stranger. It was someone she once trusted, who took everything Kirra had taught them and weaponised it.
They didn’t just attack her. They were obsessed by trying to dismantle her. A digital self-harmer, manufacturing fake accounts to bully themselves, then pointing the finger at her. They defamed her. They gaslit her. They isolated her. Until one night, at 43 years old, she checked her life insurance policy and made a quiet plan to leave.
The only thing that stopped her was a text from her teenage son: “Mum, what’s for dinner?”
That sentence brought her home. But she was not the same. Because if it could destroy someone like her....what would it do to a child?
From that reckoning came Safe on Social, which became a global force for unbiased digital safety education agency. No jargon. No corporate spin. Just truth, delivered in language that cuts through.
Kirra turned personal devastation into national infrastructure.
Today, she’s one of the most trusted and unflinching voices on digital risk in the world. She has trained more than 1,200 organisations across five continents to do one thing right: protect people before platforms.
She is the Founder of CTRL+SHFT, a bold alliance built with Maggie Dent, Dr Brad Marshall, and Madeleine West. Together, they’re doing what governments and tech giants should have done decades ago building real-time, real-life systems of care for a generation left to fend for themselves online.
Kirra lives in Florence. Works globally. Writes without permission. Speaks without dilution. She does not sell fear. She exposes it. And then she builds the tools to dismantle it.
Because digital safety is not delivered through an algorithm.
Speaking & Consulting
Kirra speaks in rooms where others tread carefully. Government briefings. Parliamentary inquiries. Law enforcement trainings. Corporate retreats where burnout hides behind lanyards and LinkedIn bios, international courtrooms as an expert witness. She’s shared the stage with world leaders and sat with traumatised teens.
Fortune 500s invite her when the stakes are human, not hypothetical. She knows that digital wellbeing can’t be faked with a mindfulness app and that real inspiration doesn’t come from buzzwords. It comes from someone who’s lived through a digital fire and built something better from the experience.
Her talks cut through the noise of life, leadership, and legacy. Her advisory services bring clarity to digital chaos: the rise of online coercion, the myth of tech neutrality, the burnout that’s eating your best people alive the need for your brand to protect its reputation. She speaks about digital trauma without softening it. About digital safety without sanitising it. About creating positive digital culture without selling it.
Kirra has delivered keynotes at international summits, papers at leading international academic conferences, led critical conversations for top-tier corporates, and been the closing voice at retreats that needed a reset, not a rah-rah.
She has advised executives, educators, and entire institutions on how to protect what matters most your people’s attention, integrity, and digital wellbeing.
She’s not your “inspo speaker.”
She’s the reason people cancel their afternoon meetings just to keep talking.
