Ms Alex Cooney:

CyberSafeIreland is the children’s charity for online safety in Ireland. We set up in 2015 and since then we have spoken to 14,000 children and to thousands of parents and teachers about staying safe online. We also gather data on an ongoing basis which enables us to monitor trends and usage and to highlight risks. We recently launched our annual report and published the data that we had gathered over the last academic year, based on responses from more than 5,000 children aged between eight and 13. Some 68% of these children owned a smartphone and 70% were signed up to social media and messaging apps, despite age restrictions of at least 13 on all such services. In short, the use of online services was pervasive among this cohort of children. Our report further highlighted that many primary school teachers are seeing the consequence of children’s online use in the classroom with 62% of teachers having dealt with online safety incidents over the last academic year. More than a third of teachers had dealt with between two and five incidents last year. Some of these incidences involved the uploading and sharing of harmful and upsetting material, including intimate images.

I am providing this data as a context to our position on the digital safety commissioner. We believe that a digital safety commissioner will offer a level of co-ordination and oversight that we currently do not have in Ireland. It will furthermore introduce a level of accountability by helping to ensure that social media companies are timely and responsive in their removal of any harmful material and consistent in their application of safeguards by providing monitoring, oversight and reporting on their performance in this regard.

As a charity that is often approached for help by parents, teachers and those working with vulnerable children, we are more aware than many of the reality of when things go wrong online, when harmful or upsetting content is either not removed or not removed quickly enough. We also know that self-regulation means that online service providers get to be judge and jury in cases of troublesome and sometimes controversial content. This is where a digital safety commissioner could play an important role in the review of materials and decision-making in respect of take-down procedures.

The Bill also proposes the introduction of a code of practice, which would mean that there would be greater consistency across platforms. The office would also have an education and research remit and would offer an important level of co-ordination in these areas. It is important to recognise that many of the leading social media platforms, including Facebook and Google, have worked consistently to improve safeguards on their platforms and have also provided some useful educational resources. It is incredibly important that they continue to prioritise safeguarding practice and design into the future. However, we need to go one step further by ensuring that all platforms are held to the same high standards and that there is a regulatory body that can provide oversight and step into the breach when needed.

In any discussion about a proposed digital safety commissioner, it is helpful to consider the precedents. The Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner was set up in 2016 as a result of the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015. While this office is still new - and it is too early to fully assess its effectiveness - commentators such as Matthew Rimmer, professor of intellectual property and innovation law at Queensland University of Technology, think that it offers value and addresses "genuine child safety issues in the digital environment which haven’t been well dealt with by governments or IT companies or the community". The Australian Parliament's legal and constitutional affairs references committee also acknowledged the importance of this office in its review of laws relating to cyberbullying earlier this year. It urged the Government to ensure that it was given appropriate levels of resources to carry out its mandate effectively.

While the UK does not have the equivalent of a digital safety commissioner, it is in the process of developing a new Internet safety strategy which will be introduced before the end of the year and which outlines some similar plans in terms of regulation. The UK Government published the results of its public consultation on its Green Paper in May and one of the findings from the consultation was that users, including children, felt powerless to address safety issues online and there was insufficient oversight of technology companies, as well as a lack of transparency on their part. The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, outlined plans to introduce a social media code of practice and transparency reporting as part of its digital charter and this may well become a legislative requirement in due course.

Given Ireland’s membership of the European Union, it is important to consider what is happening at a European level in order to put these proposals into the appropriate context. In July, the Council of Europe made some recommendations to its member states regarding children’s rights in the digital environment. The recommendations acknowledge the importance of children being able to access the online world and include a wide range of measures and proposals around children’s rights but also measures to protect them, including ensuring in-built safety by design, privacy by design and privacy by default as guiding principles for products and services, particularly those used by children. The recommendations also recognise that children, and those who care for them, need guidance and education. The document states that digital literacy education should be included in the basic education curriculum from the earliest years, taking into account children’s evolving capacities. While the recommendations are wide-ranging in nature and there is not the space to touch on all points here, I would like to highlight one other piece relating to them, namely, the need to identify and establish competent bodies with the responsibility and authority to implement actions in a timely and efficient manner, and that such bodies should be adequately resourced both in terms of funding and staffing.

The proposal for an office for a digital safety commissioner seems to offer several opportunities to meet the standards set out in the Council of Europe recommendations, although it could go further than the current proposals and include reference to the ethical and safe design of any new apps and games, as recommended by the Council of Europe. We would also like an explicit reference to the need to embed digital literacy into the curriculum to be reflected in the Bill. We must equip young people with the skills and know-how to navigate the online world in a safe and responsible manner. Education is an important part of any prevention strategy and the need for digital literacy to be taught in schools is recognised in both the UK strategy and European Council recommendations. The Bill includes many significant measures and, with some additions, it could provide a strong basis for our national strategy for dealing with online safety well into the future.