Ms Alex Cooney:

I thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to appear here this afternoon. CyberSafeKids is an Irish charity set up in 2015 with the aim of equipping children with the skills and knowledge to embrace the many opportunities for learning and enjoyment technology can deliver while avoiding the inherent risks they face in the online world such as cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content and online grooming.

We fully support the introduction of legislation that will change the landscape in Ireland with regard to online safety in general and particularly with regard to children, who are among the most vulnerable online users. We welcome the idea there will be an online safety commissioner with both the powers and the resources to make a difference if those powers and resources are well defined. The commissioner must be explicitly named in the Bill, however, so that the intention to create that post is made both clear and specific.

We welcome the proposal to have a central point of contact for a broad range of online safety matters and the fact this role will have oversight over education and public awareness, both of which are key strategies in equipping online users with the skills and knowledge to make informed decisions in the online space. We want to see the regulator’s powers further extended to include oversight and the powers to accredit online safety education programmes throughout the country.

One of the reasons we are here today is we all know self-regulation does not work. No other industry that wields such power and influence is left to self-regulate in the same way. This legislation needs to be meaningful and it must be effective. Our concern is that the stated desire to bring about systemic change will all take years to effect real change and that only dealing with super-complaints will not make a real difference to ordinary people’s lives.

This brings me to the part of this Bill that is lacking, that is, an individual complaints mechanism. It is essential such a service be available to Irish children and their guardians and that the law provide a vital safety net at a critical time. If children are being bullied or harassed online, and if they or their guardians have tried and failed to get this content removed from the online services in question, then there must be scope for them to access support and remedial action in a timely fashion.

Let me provide an example. Last year, a teacher from a secondary school in Ireland reached out to us over concern about a 14-year-old boy in her class. He had recently moved to the school after being severely bullied in his previous school. The bullying was over some videos this boy had posted on a video sharing platform when he was much younger. When it had first happened, his mother promised to get those videos down by the time her son woke up the next morning. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, she simply could not do it as he had lost his login details and she found no way around it. She reached out to the platform in question but it said the videos did not violate its community standards so it could not help. The videos stayed up for two years. The boy moved schools but became increasingly distraught about his new classmates finding this content and it all starting again. His teacher asked if we could help. We contacted the online service in question and argued the boy was under the minimum age restriction of 13 when he posted the videos. It took a bit of back and forth but all traces were removed ten days after we contacted the platform.

Imagine if that family had the option open to them at the time to take their case to an independent regulator who had the power to issue a time-bound takedown notice. It might have saved two years of living with the threat of someone seeing those videos and the worry of what he or she might say. It might have saved this boy having to move schools. Just to be clear, an individual complaints mechanism should not deal with every single case that arises. This is about putting in place an effective triage system so that it would be those cases, and only those cases, in respect of which all available channels with the relevant online service provider had been exhausted that would be dealt with. If this service would need to be for the whole of Europe, then it would need to be resourced accordingly with European money as well the proposed levy to be provided by the online services themselves.

I thank the committee for providing the opportunity to comment on this Bill, which has the potential to change the landscape with regard to online safety in Ireland if we get it right. I look forward to the members’ questions.