Ms Karen Murphy:

My understanding is that it applies to Norwegian-based platforms and photographs that have a Norwegian audience. We did a lot of research into these things and we found out about the law trough a random Facebook post early in November. When we looked into it in more detail, we found it was something a lot of individual influencers had called for for years. Edited and photoshopped images online have a negative effect on people's mental health. As Annie said, it would be a very difficult thing to police in an Irish situation but we were struck by the lack of awareness among young people about the amount of edited imagery online. We visited primary schools as part of our project and did workshops and exercises with students from age nine to about 12. We got them to compare edited and unedited photographs to see the differences and the majority genuinely did not think these photographs were edited. They thought people actually look like this on a daily basis. They did not know the images were edited, although older students know. In our school, students are told about this as part of the SPHE module and other well-being modules, but students who are eight, nine, ten or 11 do not know it. They genuinely think this is what people look like. Anyone who has any kind of awareness of mental health will know these issues start at that young age. This is where this legislation could be most powerful.