Dr. Johnny Ryan:

Thank you, Cathaoirleach. It is a privilege to be here with colleagues today. The standard of information provided thus far has been very high.

As the committee has already heard, AI is not a tomorrow or future technology. TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and others use it to shape the world that our children see through their platforms every day. The AI of these corporations builds a tailored diet of content and pushes it into each child’s feed. There is an action here. They are pushing it into the feeds and that system is known, loosely, as a recommender system. A recommender system builds a feed based on each person's estimated likelihood of engaging with material. Often that requires salacious or outrageous content or things that play upon the individual's sensitivites and vulnerabilities. That is very bad news for society but it is excellent news for the tech companies because it keeps the person on the platform for longer, which massively increases advertising opportunities. This is how the companies make money today.

Let me add to the examples that the committee has heard, all of which were excellent. I have a few more equally horrifying tales. I will begin with the fact that the United Nations has said that Meta played a determining role in Myanmar's 2017 genocide. This month, lawyers for Rohingya refugees put the blame firmly on Facebook’s recommender system which, they stated, “magnified hate speech through its algorithm”. My next example is the fact that nearly three quarters of problematic YouTube content seen by more than 37,000 test volunteers was shown to them because it was pushed at them by YouTube’s own recommender system. This is not passive; it is a push. A recent investigation by the Anti-Defamation League showed that Facebook, Instagram, and X late last year were pushing hate and conspiracy content into the feeds of 14-year-old test users. Investigations by our colleagues at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found, similar to what Ms Gallagher referenced, that young boys were having extremely hateful misogynistic content routinely pushed at them through YouTube's new video shorts feature. Our colleagues at Uplift shared a story from a member about recommender systems and I will read two lines from it: “My beautiful, intelligent, accomplished niece was encouraged, incited to see suicide as a romantic way to end her life. She did end it.” Entirely separately, Amnesty International published a remarkable study which was so simple and elegant and not dissimilar to the one described earlier.

The organisation set up an account posing as a 13-year-old girl and the account started to look for mental health content. It took a little longer on TikTok, where it was 27 minutes before she was getting material pushed at her that glamourised suicide. In the case of Meta, YouTube, Instagram, X and TikTok, their AI recommender systems are manipulating and addicting our kids. They are promoting childhood hurt, hate, self-loathing and suicide, so what can be done?

The first step is for us to acknowledge, at long last, that we cannot put our faith in voluntary action by the tech companies. The technology corporations have proven they have a remarkably poor record of self-improvement and responsible behaviour, even when they know their technology is harmful and even when lives are at risk, as they were in their tens of thousands in Myanmar. The lesson is that tech corporations will not save our children. We must have learned that by now. We have to stare this problem in the face and pick up the tools to face it. Coimisiún na Meán, in its forthcoming binding code for video platforms, is anticipated, although we will have to see whether it does it, to introduce an important new rule whereby these AI recommender systems that are based on a profile of you, a child or so-called special category data about you being a child will be turned off by default. If you want to switch it on, maybe you can do so but it will be off by default, not longer on automatically, until a person makes the decision.

We and more than 60 other organisations in Ireland have written to urge Coimisiún na Meán to do this, to introduce its rule and also to go further, namely, to make that rule inescapably binding such that the tech firms cannot wriggle out of it. We know from our polling, which was commissioned by Uplift with Ireland Thinks just a month ago, that 82% of the Irish public support such a rule. That support for a binding rule to switch off these recommender systems by default crosses the divisions in Ireland of age, education and income. Everyone wants this; there is consensus. There is also overwhelming international support for this. Coimisiún na Meán, if it proceeds as envisaged, will be leading the world. In Brussels, in December, a group of senior MEPs across the political spectrum formally wrote to the European Commission and urged it to take Coimisiún na Meán's rule, if it is binding, and apply it as a model throughout Europe. Ireland, therefore, can finally lead the world. We can at long last hold our head up high on digital regulation if we do this. A United States federal trade commissioner, Alvaro Bedoya, took to X recently to praise Coimisiún na Meán's proposed rule as the model for the White House to follow, because the White House is considering how to protect kids online.

It is clear we want binding rules to switch off these AI recommender systems by default, but it remains to be seen whether Coimisiún na Meán will, in fact, introduce this rule and whether it will be introduced in a strictly binding way. It is inevitable that that will be strongly opposed by the tech corporations that put our children in harm's way. Coimisiún na Meán will have to be resolute and will need committee members’ support individually to be resolute. We at the ICCL are urging members of the committee and the committee as a body to strongly support this rule being made strict and binding. We have the tools to address this crisis. We need to pick them up and confront this problem. Ireland can and should lead the world.