Ms Alex Cooney:

Apologies. I put my hand down but I forgot to turn on the microphone.

I thank Senator Clonan for the questions. I agree with many of the points that have already been made but I think the amplification here is just extraordinary, taking something like the potential to groom someone online compared to grooming offline. Typically and historically, it would have been one perpetrator and one victim, but now, through the enablement of technology, you can have one perpetrator and in some cases hundreds of victims. The potential for the amplification of problems is really there. This is not just technology on its own; it is human-manipulated technology. It is technology designed to hold and capture our attention, and to make us take actions that will benefit the companies, whether it is giving them more of our data or buying products as a result of stuff that has been targeted at us. There is real manipulation behind it.

As we said in our opening statement, it is not designed with children's safety in mind. Children's safety is not a central consideration, even in the AI Act that we now have in place. It does not talk about child-centred design being an important and essential consideration. We have some way to go. There have been a few moments that have been described as "tobacco moments", for example, the coroner's inquest into the death of Molly Russell, where it was concluded that she had not only sought out content related to self-harm and suicide but she had also been served up thousands of pieces of search content by the services that she was using. I wonder how many tobacco moments we need for real change to actually happen.