Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

Education is important and it needs to go hand-in-hand with a structure that holds. There needs to be responsibility on all sides in some sense. Some parents might hear "education" as them being criticised that they do not know enough but this is a multi-way street. The social media companies have an obligation, and we, as a society, have an obligation to put in place the rules of the games, digital age of consent and so on but education needs support. I agree with the Deputy that the digital age of consent might be misunderstood as a term. It has not been referenced or named in the GDPR and, therefore, it is not called the digital age of consent. It has become the term that people identify it as.

The warning signs are often not all that obvious until it is too late. There is a nice statistic, which says that the average teenager has seven online personalities, of which a parent is only aware of three. There are other ways in which a teenager or young person presents himself or herself online, perhaps through multiple accounts or multiple platforms, and the problem is that once the parents are taken out of the equation, they are no longer required for consent. We have to sort out the age verification issue carefully, as Deputy Chambers said. We cannot even throw a loop around the issue and figure out how to address it because it is multifaceted. Protocols rather than bans should be implemented because people do not respond positively to bans. That drives issues underground and we do not deal with them and so on.