Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 7 May 2026
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children and Equality
Safety and Well-being of Children Online: Discussion (Resumed)
2:00 am
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Apologies have been received from Senator Bradley.
The agenda item for consideration this morning is a discussion on technology, social media and children, with a particular focus on the safety and well-being of children online. This meeting is a resumption of this topic.
This morning we are joined by Mr. Dualta Ó Broin, director of public policy at Meta, which provides a range of online services including Instagram and WhatsApp; Ms Susan Moss, head of public policy, and Mr. Richard Collard, minor safety public policy lead at TikTok; Ms Freddie Cook, public policy for the UK and Ireland at Snap Inc., who is joining the meeting remotely via MS Teams; Mr. Ryan Meade, government affairs and public policy manager, and Ms Chloe Setter, child safety public policy manager, Google Ireland; and Ms Liz Thomas, senior director of global public policy and digital safety, and Mr. Ciarán Conlon, director of public policy, at Microsoft Ireland. They are all very welcome to the meeting. I thank them for coming and acknowledge their presence.
Representatives from Sony Group Corporation were invited to appear before the committee this morning but declined to accept the invitation. While other forms of engagement were suggested by Sony, it is was a decision by the members of this committee to have representatives from companies either present here or appearing via MS Teams.
We really appreciate the engagement from all who are present. We can all agree this is a defining issue facing children growing up in Ireland and indeed across the world. It is my duty as Cathaoirleach to be very clear that we expect more to be done to protect our children. We have had many discussions over recent weeks with different stakeholders and received submissions from the Garda, psychologists, NGOs, Coimisiún na Meán and the Department, but most important, in the past two sessions we heard from children. They all spoke to us about the different dangers and harms children are being exposed to and are encountering when using some of the witnesses' products. We heard worrying information about algorithms, inadequate age verification, unacceptable reporting, some addictive features and cyberbullying.
We have also heard positives. We have heard positives such as connections and the ability to be creative, learn and share knowledge. The children deserve, and really spoke eloquently about wanting, a safe digital environment and I feel the witnesses have a duty to provide that. I hope that today we will hear how they plan to do that.
Before we begin, there are a few housekeeping matters to go through. The chat function on MS Teams should only be used to make the team on site aware of any technical issues or urgent matters that may arise and should not be used to make general comments or statements during the meeting. I also remind our members of the constitutional requirement that members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex in order to participate in public meetings. I will not permit a member to participate where they are not adhering to this constitutional requirement. Therefore, any member who attempts to participate from outside the precincts will be asked to leave the meeting. In this regard I ask any members participating via MS Teams that prior to making their contribution to the meeting they confirm they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.
To our witnesses and members, I will read a note on parliamentary privilege. They are all protected by absolute privilege in respect of the presentation they make to the committee. This means they will have an absolute defence against any defamation action for anything they say at the meeting. However, they are expected not to abuse this privilege and it is my duty as Cathaoirleach to ensure this privilege is not abused. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.
For the witness appearing before the committee virtually via MS Teams, I need to point out that there is uncertainty if parliamentary privilege will apply to her evidence from a location outside the parliamentary precincts of Leinster House. Therefore, if she is directed by me to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter, it is also imperative that she comply with any such direction.
Witnesses will be allocated three minutes' speaking time to deliver their opening statements. They will see the clock just under the screens. I will call them in the following order: Dualta Ó Broin, Susan Moss, Frederika Cook, Ryan Meade, Liz Thomas and Ciarán Conlon. I invite Mr. Ó Broin to deliver his opening statement.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
I thank the members of the committee for the invitation to appear before it today to discuss Meta's approach to child safety and teen protections across our platforms. In the interests of time I will read excerpts from the opening statement rather than the whole thing.
The safety and well-being of young people on our platforms is a core priority for Meta and over the last number of years, we have fundamentally changed how teenagers experience our platforms. Rather than simply providing parents and teens with the tools to manage their own experiences, we have rolled out teen accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, which place teens in age-appropriate experiences with built-in restrictions and parental oversight. On Instagram, these built-in protections include private accounts by default, the strictest content control settings, overnight notifications turned off and app usage reminders after 60 minutes. We know that 97% of teens aged 13 to 15 have stayed in these built-in restrictions, which we believe offer one of the safest experiences for teens across the industry. According to a US survey conducted by Ipsos, over 90% of parents have found each built-in protection feature helpful.
More recently we have made several updates to teen accounts to continue providing safer, age-appropriate experiences for teens. In April we revamped our content policies to automatically place users under the age of 18 into a 13+ content setting, so that teens will see content on Instagram that is similar to what they would see in an age-appropriate movie. Earlier this week we announced that we are expanding our technology to proactively identify accounts we suspect belong to teens, even where an adult birthday has been provided, and place those accounts into teen account protections. We also shared more detail on our ongoing investment in advanced AI to detect underage accounts, going well beyond simple self-declarations of age. We are using AI to analyse entire profiles for contextual clues that indicate that an account probably belongs to someone underage. We have also simplified reporting processes so that members of our community can more easily flag suspected underage accounts, and strengthened our security measures to prevent new accounts from users we suspect are underage.
Taking a step back from our own apps, we understand it can be overwhelming for parents to stay on top of every new feature and product across every application. In the US, the average teenager uses 44 apps on their phones. We believe a significant step forward can be taken at a European level to ensure that parents only need to verify the age of their child once and that their child will then be placed into an age-appropriate experience on every single app. We believe the most efficient and effective way in which this would work would be at the operating system or app store level, but we are not dogmatic about this. It is important to emphasise that resolving the question of age verification does not absolve any individual app or service of the need to ensure that teens have age-appropriate experiences on their platforms and our teen accounts are industry leading in this regard.
I have run out of time. I look forward to the discussion.
Ms Susan Moss:
On behalf of TikTok Ireland, I thank the Chair and the committee for this opportunity to discuss technology, social media and children, with a focus on the safety and well-being of teenagers.
Every day, teenagers in Ireland express their creativity and learn on TikTok. That brings opportunity but it also brings great responsibility. At TikTok, that responsibility is clear. The safety of younger users is our most important job. We build strong safeguards into teen accounts by default to help ensure young people have positive experiences and to give Irish parents peace of mind.
We design our platform with safety from the outset, including private accounts by default, restrictions on direct messaging and a 60-minute screen time limit. In total, there are more than 50 preset safety settings designed for younger people.
However, safety does not stop with settings. When teens need support, parents are often the first people they can turn to, making them one of our most important partners. That is why we remain focused on reaching parents with information they need about TikTok. Since launching our parental controls five years ago, we have continually added new features based on feedback from families, as well as guidance from leading experts. Last year, we also shared that TikTok has been making ongoing improvements to our safety technologies and enhancements to our content moderation processes. Those investments continue to bear out. For example, in Ireland, 95% of user-reported content was removed within two hours of receiving that report; 98% of violative videos are proactively detected and removed before they are ever reported; and 90% of videos that break our rules are removed before they receive a single view.
We also recognise that the online experience should be educational and enriching. In Ireland, we have developed an independently assessed and age-appropriate STEM feed, which is igniting new interests in everything from physics to mechanical engineering. Some 25% of Irish teenagers return every week to the dedicated STEM feed for lessons in subjects like biochemistry and agricultural science from Irish teachers. To date, educational videos on TikTok's STEM feed have been viewed more than 10 million times in Ireland. We are also seeing meaningful cultural impact. Use of the Irish language is growing on TikTok, and recent polling demonstrates that TikTok users are more likely to say they speak Irish than users of any other social media platform. For many, TikTok is not just entertainment, it is a way to connect with and sustain our national language. We estimate that around one in ten Irish people has furthered their use of the Irish language after hearing it on our platform, and more than half of respondents say TikTok is playing an active role in helping preserve our native language.
We know that no single company can address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. Keeping young people safe online requires partnership between platforms, parents, educators and policymakers. We welcome that engagement, and we look forward to working constructively with the committee.
Ms Freddie Cook:
I am grateful for the opportunity to appear before the committee today, and particularly appreciate the ability to join virtually. I lead public policy for the UK and Ireland at Snap Inc., the company behind the visual messaging platform, Snapchat. We really welcome the committee's focus on technology, social media and minors, and how we can all better protect teen safety and wellbeing online.
Snapchat was intentionally designed to be different from traditional social media. It opens to a camera, encouraging people to talk to close friends in real time rather than broadcast to large public audiences, and our product design includes intentional steps to limit the reach of unvetted, potentially harmful content that can go viral elsewhere. These safeguards do not eliminate risk, but they do help to shape it. The risks young people face online are not unique to any one platform or service, and they change as teens grow older and the landscape evolves, but we also recognise that they must be faced squarely. Our approach to safety is grounded in young people's rights, particularly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Young people have a right to participate in the digital world, to access information, to play and connect, and a right to be protected from violence, exploitation and harm. In our view, the task for policymakers and industry is to uphold those rights together, not simply to restrict access, but to ensure that services embrace safety by design, are ageappropriate and are respectful of young people’s dignity and best interests.
At Snap, this starts with product design. We take steps to make it harder for strangers to find and contact teens. We default under18s into more protective settings, and we reduce the prominence of public content in their online experience. We invest heavily in proactive detection of the gravest harms, including grooming for sexual purposes, sexual exploitation and selfharm. We report illegal child sexual abuse material to the relevant authorities. We know we must continually improve these systems as offenders constantly adapt. We also believe in collaboration with families and educators. Our family centre suite of tools allows parents and caregivers to see who their teen is connected with and how they are using Snapchat, without reading private messages. We have developed "the keys", an interactive digital safety programme for teens, parents and teachers, to help build digital literacy and resilience, skills that we see as essential if we are to advance goals on health, education and safer, inclusive societies.
On regulation, we support clear, enforceable, riskbased frameworks that ensure high standards, while recognising the varying functionalities and risk profiles of different platforms. We see real value in stronger ageappropriate design requirements and robust oversight of how platforms mitigate the highest risk harms. At the same time, legislation cannot do everything. Wellresourced education, youth services and mental health services are vital to supporting teen selfesteem and to responding when harm occurs. As in the offline world, there is no single measure that will make teens completely safe online. Progress depends on shared responsibility; companies designing and enforcing safer products; governments and regulators setting and enforcing strong rules; schools and civil society building skills and support; and families having access to clear information and tools. Our commitment is to continue improving the safety of Snapchat for young people in Ireland and around the world, to be transparent about our progress and challenges, and to work constructively with this committee and Irish authorities as they consider how best to safeguard young people's rights and wellbeing online.
Our objective is straightforward; it is to make Snapchat one of the safest places for young people to connect with close friends and known contacts online, while equipping parents with the information and tools they need, and working hand in hand with regulators, experts and law enforcement to tackle the most serious harms. I look forward to members' questions.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
Thank you, a Chathaoirligh and members of the joint committee, for inviting us to speak on this important topic of children and technology. I work with Google Ireland as Government affairs and public policy manager. I am joined by my colleague, Chloe Setter, who leads our child safety public policy work for Europe. We are grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this conversation.
Online experiences are a foundational part of young people's everyday lives. At Google we recognise the profound impact the online world can have. Online safety and information quality are critical components of our commitment to users, in particular our youngest users. We take our responsibilities seriously and our approach to children and families is built on three essential pillars: protecting young people online, respecting families' unique relationships with technology, and empowering youth to safely learn and explore in the digital world. Providing high-quality, safe and age-appropriate experiences for young people is something our users can and should expect of us.
Teenagers today can access a world of possibilities with Google. Whether it is exploring important topics around the world with search or looking up a video on YouTube to help with maths homework, our goal is to empower them to safely learn online, explore their passions, and express themselves and find belonging. We know that children and teens are spending more time online and we recognise that protecting them as they do so poses unique challenges. For over two decades, we have worked closely with policymakers, law enforcement, educators and child safety experts to design and develop tools and resources to protect children and help families navigate technology and make informed choices that are right for their specific circumstances. We take seriously our responsibility to promote positive online experiences and we support regulatory approaches that promote both online safety and balanced practices. We build age-appropriate experiences with products like Family Link and YouTube Kids. We enforce our robust content policies at scale through safety engineering centres, including our Dublin hub, and we deliver digital literacy programmes in collaboration with organisations, including Barnardos, A Lust for Life, the ADAPT Centre and the GAA. Since 2019, these digital literacy initiatives have provided crucial online safety training to 300,000 children, 5,000 parents and 2,500 schools in Ireland.
Our goal is to give children and teens the opportunity and tools to navigate their curiosity and imagination while keeping their safety, privacy and well-being at the forefront. We build products that align with their developmental stages and needs, we offer tools that give families flexibility to manage their unique relationships with technology and we implement policies, protections and programmes specifically tailored to youth experiences. These include default "on" privacy protections and features such as bedtime and take a break reminders for our users under the age of 18. We know that the way companies like Google address online safety has an impact both on society as a whole and on the trust users place in our services. We recognise the important role we play in the lives of Ireland's young people and want to provide them with the opportunity to navigate their imagination and curiosity safely online, with their privacy and well-being at the forefront of our work. Alongside regulation, the technology, media and entertainment industries have a responsibility to their youngest users, and we are committed to doing our part to keep the digital ecosystem safe and reliable. I thank the committee for convening this important hearing. We look forward to members' questions.
Mr. Ciarán Conlon:
Microsoft welcomes the opportunity to join this very important conversation of the committee's with work on children's and young people’s well-being. While we are global in scale, Microsoft has deep roots in Ireland, as people may know. In fact, just last year, we celebrated our 40th anniversary of investing in Ireland and we now employ over 6,400 people here.
I thank Ms Thomas for joining us today. When we met yesterday, I found out a lot more about her previous career, which may be interesting to the committee as well, such as her work with the New Zealand Government and leading out on the response to the Christchurch call back in 2019. I found that interesting and thought I would share that because it adds context.
While not a social media platform, our products, spanning enterprise, education, productivity and gaming, are used by families and schools across Ireland. Our approach to online safety focuses on three pillars; calibration, content moderation and collaboration. These pillars sit alongside age-appropriate protections and Ireland’s digital age of consent. Our safety approach is grounded in the principle that technology should be designed and governed to be safe, trustworthy and inclusive. It also balances young people’s rights to expression, access to information, privacy and security. We apply a risk-proportionate model tailored to the nature and potential harms of each service. That approach is structured around those three interrelated pillars. Calibration is safety by design; building protections that are proportionate to risk and sensitive to context rather than relying on a binary allow or ban approach. In practice, calibration includes age-appropriate experiences and default settings, safety and privacy safeguards, ongoing assessment of emerging risks and family safety settings and other guardrails. This approach aligns with EU frameworks such as the DSA and supports Ireland’s work to embed this safety by design type of approach.
Content moderation complements design measures through consistent and transparent processes to prevent, detect and respond to illegal and harmful content and conduct. This includes clear reporting and blocking tools, proactive detection of severe harms such as CSAM and grooming, human and automated review to assess reports and enforcement actions such as content removal and account measures. Calibration recognises that digital safety is a whole-of-society challenge. Microsoft works with all relevant stakeholders, both in Ireland and the EU, to support evidence-based approaches and to incorporate expert insights and children’s lived experiences into service design and governance. Education and resilience also matter. Protections are strongest when paired with initiatives that build awareness, confidence and responsible behaviour. In Ireland, Microsoft has an initiative called "dream space" that is based on our campus in Leopardstown that looks to integrate online safety awareness into a standard STEM programme. We have reached 500,000 students since we launched it in 2018 and we want to reach 1 million over the coming years. We can talk a little bit more about that.
Within this framework, age-appropriate protections and clear expectations around age are critical. Ireland’s digital age of consent is 16 under GDPR. Discussions on age assurance should focus on solutions that are effective and proportionate and that respect children’s rights to privacy, participation and inclusion. They should avoid unintended exclusion from beneficial digital services used for learning, creativity and social connection. We look forward to the conversation and taking the committee's questions.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Conlon and all of the other witnesses for their opening statements and the work they have done in coming here today. It is proposed to publish the opening statements to the Oireachtas website, is that agreed? Agreed.
Before I call members, I remind them that they are allocated seven minutes speaking time and that must include the response from witnesses. Hopefully, we will have time for a brief second round of questioning. When putting questions, I ask members to please adhere strictly to the agenda item under consideration this morning. I will call members in accordance with the speaking rota.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I welcome all of the witnesses. I was struck by how we were told about all of the things they are doing to make things safer and yet, we know because we have heard from all of the advocacy groups, we have heard from parents and we have heard from children that they are seeing inappropriate content, including a group of schoolchildren I had in yesterday who I asked them again about social media.
I will start with Meta. It talks about safeguards. What is the company actually doing in terms of the recommender systems and the algorithms? We know kids are seeing inappropriate content so it really is incumbent upon Meta to make sure there is safety by design built into the algorithms and that kids are seeing age-appropriate content.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
I thank the Deputy. We fundamentally changed the approach to how teens use our services. We have teen accounts now in place and there are two buckets within that. We have changed how the content they see within that works as well. We are focused now on this 13 plus type of content which is similar to what you would see in a movie of that rating. The type of things that are ruled out under that would be dangerous stunts or dangerous pranks, etc. There is also an additional step parents can take in terms of going further than that 13 plus type of content and limiting the content even further.
Sometimes, the question of algorithms and recommender systems is turned into quite a binary thing in that it is either good or bad. Under the DSA, we are required to mitigate the risks that our services present, including recommender systems. It is important to look at the recommender systems and how they are being used to service positive content.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Mr Ó Broin mentioned stunts. What about suicidal ideation and encouraging anorexia and bulimia? Are those things-----
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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How is Meta making sure that is the case?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
Because we work closely with academics and researchers in this space. Up until a number of years ago, it was thought that it was actually positive for teens to be able to express suicide-related content or suicide-related thoughts online. A number of years ago, that changed. The thinking around it changed and it was then thought that is not the case. All of that content was removed from the recommendations that could be shown to users who are under 18.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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What verification or sampling does Meta carry out to make sure no content is slipping through?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Is Mr. Ó Broin happy to share the logic he is using with regulators more publicly so that people can trust what he is saying here?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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How often do they audit Meta or have those conversations and check?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I will move to TikTok. It has provided very impressive moderation statistics but many parents are concerned about why harmful content is actually reaching their children in the first place. Can Mr. Collard tell us how TikTok is ensuring children will only see age appropriate content?
Mr. Richard Collard:
Before joining TikTok, I worked for four years at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, NSPCC, the UK's equivalent to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, ISPCC. I have spoken to parents and I know this is an issue they really care about. Like we said at the beginning-----
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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It is not just parents; children are also telling us as well that they are seeing inappropriate content.
Mr. Richard Collard:
There are about 100 million pieces of content uploaded everyday to TikTok and we want to make sure children have that age appropriate experience. Of that 100 million, about 1% is violative and we want to reduce that as much as possible. We remove the vast majority of that through automated technology before anyone even reports that to us. We need to be conscious there are types of content that while not violative of our policies, if seen in concentration, it could be problematic.
Let us take people talking about their own mental health journeys. Seeing one person talk about that would be fine but seeing that 50 times in a row would not be and that is why we have a tool called our dispersion tool. It is about making sure that anyone on TikTok does not have a really concentrated, narrow experience of seeing content. We are injecting new forms of content within their experience so they continue to see a diverse range of content.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Does TikTok consider safety by design in how it presents content to children?
Mr. Richard Collard:
We follow safety by design. In our organisation, there are people with backgrounds in everything from child development and clinical psychology to law enforcement. We all input into decisions, whether they are policy decisions or products that are rolling out, so that we make sure there are a range of views going into these product decisions.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Is it designed to be addictive?
Mr. Richard Collard:
No, we would not say it is designed to be addictive. One thing we know people care a lot about is screen time and the amount of time people spend on the platform.
That is why we have introduced a number of restrictions and frictions in our systems. We have a 60-minute screen time limit by default for everyone under 18 on the platform. This means that if you are a teen using TikTok and you are scrolling and reach that 60 minutes, there is a full screen takeover and you are expected to enter a code to continue using the platform.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Has TikTok done any studies on the effects of screen time?
Mr. Richard Collard:
Yes, we have commissioned studies. A couple of years ago we commissioned a European charity to look at what parents and teens need from safety tools. What came out of this research was that it is really important for people to have information as to how much time they are using on the platform and that they have tools available to them. Every week we provide-----
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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Did the study consider the negative impacts of screen time?
Mr. Richard Collard:
This would have looked at screen time in the round. It would have looked at what people do not like about spending a significant amount of screen time as well. On the back of that, we produce a weekly report that goes out to all teens displaying that on Monday they used TikTok for 30 minutes, on Tuesday it was 40 minutes and so on.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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What were the impacts-----
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Boland. I call Deputy Claire Kerrane.
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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I thank all the witnesses for being here this morning and for the documentation they have provided. I will come to Meta first and its opening statement. Time had run out but in the written submission there is a paragraph towards the end on child sexual abuse material, CSAM, and non-consensual intimate imagery. Meta states that the sharing these are the "most serious policy violations". Will Mr. O'Broin tell us what the consequences are for engaging in what is deemed the most serious policy violation on the platform? The statement goes on to say that all instances of this are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC. Is it just reported to that agency? Can Mr. O'Broin give us any idea of the number of these reports made annually? How many staff within the Meta organisation are dealing with this kind of material online in Ireland, or globally if that is the figure they have? Perhaps Meta could furnish this to the committee afterwards if the representatives do not have it to hand.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
It is difficult to be very black and white but deactivation is the outcome. All would be referred to NCMEC, which is the centre in the US. That agency then works with global law enforcement in relation to the referrals that come in. They then triage those out to law enforcement around the world and then law enforcement locally, such as An Garda Síochána. When the Garda were in, they referred to NCMEC as well. They would take those referrals and act on them within Ireland.
I do not have the breakdown of what staff would be working on a particular harm. The platforms as a whole have different teams and there are smaller groups with really deep expertise, as my colleague has said, who have studied this and how to combat it. Then there are the wider operational teams that work on it as well. One of the significant positives of AI, in particular in a heinous area like this, is that it is very good at rapidly identifying CSAM before it even needs to be seen by anyone, and removing it or referring it on to NCMEC.
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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Is Meta relying on AI for the vast majority of the detection of that kind of material or for all of that?
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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It would be really helpful after this meeting if all the platforms present could furnish us with statistics on the number of reports they are getting, and the amount of content that is being reported and removed from each of the platforms' sites every year. That will be helpful to us. The platforms all have large staff numbers. I would like to know how many staff within each of the organisations are dedicated to this kind of work, particularly where AI is doing the bulk of that work.
With TikTok, there was agreement by most of the young people we heard from in our committee hearings in the past couple of weeks where they described TikTok as addictive. That was their word. There is an overall feeling that this is what it is. The examples of the percentages for Ireland that TikTok witnesses gave in their opening statement look good on the face of it in terms of 95% 98% or 90%, but do the witnesses have any further figures? For example, a figure of 95% was given for user-reported content but how often is content reported on the TikTok platform? Have the witnesses any figures in relation to that?
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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Do the witnesses agree that TikTok can be addictive?
Mr. Richard Collard:
We would not agree with the term "addictive", but that does not mean we do not take the well-being of children incredibly seriously. When we look at the TikTok recommender algorithm, for us that is about making sure, with a platform with 100 million pieces of content uploaded every day, that this content is relevant to the users of that platform. It is also what powers our STEM feed, which 25% of Irish teens come back to on a weekly basis. It is what made TikTok the number one platform for book discovery with young users. Of course, this does not mean that teens do not need greater protection than adults on the platform and that is why we have 50 preset safety features on teen accounts by default. This gives them that higher level of protection than adults. This includes the screen time cap but there are other things we do as well to introduce friction into the user experience.
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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Is TikTok also reliant on AI for identifying a lot of the harmful content that appears?
Ms Susan Moss:
We use a combination of artificial intelligence, multimodal models, large language models, LLMs, and people. People will always be an important part in content moderation. Similar to what my colleague Mr. Ó Broin said, the benefit of AI is that we are able to see a reduction of 76% in the amount of time that our human moderators are looking at gratuitous and graphic content. That can only be a good thing for their welfare. AI is excellent at being able to moderate very visual and graphic content. Some of this is to the point made around CSAM, which falls into that category.
Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein)
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I do not have much time left but I just wanted to ask Ms Cook about Snapchat. She made the point that product design includes intentional steps to limit the reach of unvetted potentially harmful content that can go viral on other platforms. Will she tell us a little bit more about that and how it works?
Ms Freddie Cook:
Of course. It is really clear that Snap is used predominantly for private messaging between known contacts so it is not really the place that teens or others go to share or hope for a viral video or anything like that. The design choices that the company made to really delineate between the teen experience and the over 18s on it are quite clear. For example, teens cannot be messaged by someone they have not added as a friend or do not have in their phone contacts. If a teen starts chatting with someone they may not know, then we serve an in-app warning prompting them to pause and consider whether they want to continue that contact. I can also go into detail on the family centre but I am conscious of time. That really allows parents and teens to have some visibility over who the teens may be speaking to and what groups they may be in, but do not have the detail of the content of the conversation. That is the difference between Snap and the other platforms we are hearing from.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for being here today. Last week we heard from teenagers and their research that one in eight 15- to 16-year-olds have had a sexually explicit image of them shared across the apps. Can the witnesses confirm that this is in line with the reports each of the platforms is getting on their apps and that it is as high as one in eight?
Ms Chloe Setter:
YouTube does not allow direct messaging for under 18s. That is a deliberate design choice because we recognise the vulnerabilities in private messaging. It is a difficult space to police.
Google Messages is allowed for under-18s. We introduce friction into that experience. We default it so that, for under-18s, any kind of nudity in messages is blurred. If someone is receiving or trying to send it, information pops up asking whether you are sure you want to send this kind of thing, mentions the implications and directs young people to resources. That is on by default for under-18s and cannot be turned off.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Setter. Does Mr. Ó Broin want to comment?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
Yes. I am not able to comment on the numbers. We have taken a range of measures in the teen account space. The ability to send nude direct messages, DMs, to each other, for teens who know each other, is turned off by default. There is also a range of work we have done in terms of establishing ways for victims or people who believe they are potential victims of non-consensual intimate image, NCII, sharing to pro-actively but confidentially share the images with us and these are then shared with the wider industry to ensure the images cannot be shared. There is an organisation called StopNCII.org, which we helped to establish, that is the driver there. It is ensuring you can prevent the harm before it happens.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Mr.Ó Broin. As parents, I think we would all agree we have huge responsibility in this field and that it is not solely down to the witnesses or legislation. However, I was thinking about it this morning and while I consider myself to be a little tech-savvy and I use some of the apps fairly regularly, as a social media user and a parent I have never stumbled across any outreach from any of the apps to help me as a parent understand them better and what I should do to control my children's access. For example, Meta is in my constituency in Meath. It has really positive community outreach and Ms Aoife Flynn and the team there are fantastic, but in terms of parental outreach, we may be tech-savvy but we are time-poor. If I was to go and look for the information, it would be there, but it is about having the time to do so. What if I was invited to my local school or sports club to attend a talk from some of the witnesses about this? That might sound counterproductive but the more knowledge I have, the more likely I am to allow my children access to apps. I am wondering whether the witnesses' companies do any outreach like that.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
As the Deputy says, there is a huge amount of information out there. We appreciate that not every parent has the time to go across however many apps their children might be using. We have taken a number of steps in terms of support. There is this UNESCO idea of the whole-of-school approach to cyberbullying and we provide the foundational funding for FUSE, which is a programme that is run out of the anti-bullying centre in DCU. It is a first-of-its kind programme that managed to leverage funding from other places, which is great. It is now available to all primary and post-primary schools. It is trying to raise awareness and literacy around the issue, but it is also about understanding what the various roles are, like what is the role of the board of management, the teacher, the parent and so on, in all of this. That is ongoing and very positive. I think the Department of education is now supporting it, which is fantastic from our perspective. We also support the National Parents Council's helpline and the training it provides to parents. That is through the office of Internet safety structure, which is coming down and is a European Union thing. In addition to the resources we have on our platforms, we do our best to ensure that the advice put out in Ireland is not Meta-specific advice but will improve the entire ecosystem. That is what we are trying to achieve there.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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That is great. I thank Mr. Ó Broin.
Mr. Richard Collard:
If I can come in there, parents have a role and we have a role as well. We try to give the base experience so that all children have a good experience on the platform but there is a lot that can be done through things like parental controls. We have a tool called family pairing so you can, in answer to some of the questions about screen time earlier, limit your teen's screen time on the platform. You could set it so that it would be only five minutes on school nights and some time on weekends. Awareness of these tools is historically quite high but adoption is not as great as we would like it to be, because when we talk to parents about using the tools, they say there are really helpful. As for what we are doing to get the message out there, we have done marketing campaigns and had messages on bus stops. We have also sent everyone on TikTok who is over the age of 35 an inbox notification to say we have these tools in the hope some might be parents who do not know about the tools. We have also worked with external partners to help push the resources they have, such as spunout in Ireland.
Ms Susan Moss:
In the Irish context, what we have learned from parents year on year is that they have a lot going on and enough to be doing. We want to make sure that we are not just educating parents in-app in an online space but in person. That is why we reach more than 90,000 parents and educators annually with what we call Tigh TikTok, which is "TikTok house" as Gaeilge. Some of the members were there. It is a safety centre where we educate parents but we do it in an entertaining way. We think that is the best way to get through to Irish parents.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I welcome all of the witnesses and thank them for their opening statements. They know there is a huge level of responsibility on their shoulders. I always say it is very hard being young now but it is also very hard being the parents of young people. Online has opened a whole new world for the younger generation but that has also brought a lot of disadvantages. The witnesses are aware of the huge responsibility, and while I am not saying it is their sole responsibility, they play a big role in keeping our young people safe.
To Mr. Collard and Ms Moss and to follow on from my colleague's question about parental involvement, how does TikTok protect children whose parents may not be very engaged in their lives for various reasons or who may not be tech-savvy at all?
Ms Susan Moss:
This goes back to the earlier point that it is really all about outreach and reaching parents where they are and not just online. If they are not online, we want to make sure we are not just reaching out via in-app advertisements but also through educational campaigns with teachers. We did an educational booklet for teachers and for schools that children can bring home to their parents in Irish and English. We do Tigh TikTok, which is the TikTok safety house. We do that every year. We are also engaging in marketing campaigns through Irish newspapers and bus stop advertisements because we know it is very difficult and there is so much going on for parents day to day. We are doing our best to get through to them and reach them in a place where they are already are. We have seen that bearing fruit as the amount of use of our parental control tools has doubled in Ireland, which is a positive sign that information and education are getting through.
Mr. Richard Collard:
To build on Ms Moss's answer, as well as providing that outreach we want to make sure that the base experience that teens on our platform have is a good experience. We are removing content that violates our community guidelines. We are also providing children with a stronger level of protection than adults, so they have a different content experience. If you are 13 to 15 on our platform, you will have a different experience than if you are 16, 17 or an adult. You have different functions available to you. The youngest users of our platform do not have direct messaging, for instance. If you are 16 or 17, you can turn that on, although it is off by default. If you are 18, you can access things like LIVE. We think this is a developmentally appropriate way of designing a platform that restricts things for the youngest ages, bearing in mind that we do not allow anyone under the age 13 on the platform. It is about making sure that, as the Senator said, if some parents are not involved, we still have a base level that is a good experience for our youngest users.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Moss and Mr. Collard. Moving to Mr. Meade and Ms Setter, we all know that harmful content has been reported on child-focused products. Can they expand on what specific improvements are being implemented by Google to address this?
Ms Chloe Setter:
I thank the Senator. Like the other companies the Senator has heard from, we also have very strict and robust policies against certain types of content on YouTube. We have robust content moderation in order to remove that content proactively and as quickly as possible.
We restrict mature content on YouTube, for example, for under-18s. We do not have traditional social features like other platforms. There is no direct messaging. We do not curate friends lists or ways to connect people on YouTube. However, we recognise it is not just about removing low-quality and harmful content; it is also about incentivising good content. We have recently introduced these teen quality principles that we developed with our family advisory committee, which is made up of clinical psychologists and developmental experts. This is essentially to try to incentivise creators to create better content that is age appropriate, educational and enriching for young people. We are trying to do both things. We are trying to incentivise the creation of good content but also remove content that breaches our policies or is low-quality content for young people.
I wanted to flag that this year we have announced and launched a shorts timer. This is an industry first. It recognises there are concerns around short-form content. It is something that allows parents to set the timer for shorts on YouTube down to zero. That is a really big step we wanted to take to recognise there are concerns around young people doomscrolling, as it were, and looking at lots of short-form content in a row. YouTube is a very broad platform. People go and watch it on the television as a family. They can watch films, stream football matches and listen to music, so it is fundamentally quite different from some platforms in that it has a lot of long-form content. However, we did hear the concerns about short-form content and we wanted to take action on that.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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Teen accounts were highlighted as a major safety innovation. Is the effectiveness of this measured? Would Meta object to it being inspected by an outside body to prove its effectiveness?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
In terms of measuring effectiveness, all of our services are subject to regulation by a number of regulators. One of the requirements we must meet around the Digital Services Act is the risk to under-age users. That ongoing oversight is happening all the time. We have those conversations going on but we are constantly innovating on how to improve the environment. Tuesday's announcement related to the further steps we are taking on age verification and the further improvements we are making to teen accounts.
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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Is Meta monitoring that on an ongoing basis?
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Go raibh maith agat, Senator. Very timely as always.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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In March this year, a young woman identified as Kaley won a landmark case in America and was awarded $6 million in damages after she sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media. A jury found that Meta and Google, the owners of YouTube, had intentionally built addictive social media platforms that harmed the woman's mental health. Both platforms have billions of users and hundreds of similar cases are making their way through the courts. What measures have the platforms taken to prevent further litigation? The same would apply to Snapchat and TikTok, which were both initially part of the defendants in the case before reaching settlements. What measures have they taken to prevent further litigation?
Mr. Ryan Meade:
The Senator will appreciate that we cannot speak in detail about any ongoing litigation. In the particular case the Senator mentioned, Google has said it will issue an appeal. I can say that YouTube has been at the forefront of building age-appropriate products and experiences for over a decade. We do that work in conjunction with expert advisers, including the youth advisory panel that Ms Setter referred to, which includes child development experts and experts on mental health and other issues. That has driven our product development to protect the well-being of young people. Additionally, we have worked to ensure that young people can safely enjoy the benefits our products provide in terms of learning, education and exploration. For that reason, we do not agree with the verdict and Google intends to appeal.
To answer the Senator's question on what measures we are continuing to introduce to address concerns in this area, we have been rolling out extensive well-being features, particularly on YouTube. These include age-appropriate experiences and products such as YouTube Kids; supervised experiences for older kids and younger teens whereby parents can choose the type of content that is available to their young person and other settings, including well-being features like take-a-break reminders to encourage young people to take a break if they are on the platform for very long; and bedtime reminders to instill healthy bedtime habits. Ms Setter mentioned one of our newest product features which is the timer for short-form content. This is a industry first where parents can set for their kids a time period they are allowed to scroll through short-form content. They can set that to zero if they wish, if they are concerned about that particular type of content.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
Similarly, given that it is an ongoing case, I am quite limited in what I can say. However, I can say that Meta respectfully disagrees with those verdicts and that Meta will appeal. We remain committed to building safe, supportive environments for young people and will defend our record vigorously. Leaving the court case to one side, we have built over 50 tools. I submitted a timeline of when those tools were released and what they do. Many of those tools have been subsumed into the teen accounts experience. We believe that with the teen accounts experience and the ongoing improvements we are making, we are industry leading in terms of the safest environments for teens online.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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Ms Moss can speak about the case because TikTok reached a settlement with the client.
Ms Susan Moss:
We take each case on its merits, but we want to spend our time and focus our efforts on improving safety rather than in the courts. It is important to note that TikTok introduced a 60-minute screen time limit many years ago, which parents can set the code to through parental controls. We did that in collaboration with the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital. We worked with independent experts to help us determine the appropriate screen time limit.
Ms Freddie Cook:
As Ms Moss shared, I reiterate the Snap sees cases predominantly for that direct messaging between mutually accepted friendships. In terms of the addiction or addictive design feature conversation, Snap streaks are a feature on the platform. That is when the user exchanges photos, which we call snaps, with a known contact. The user might then have a number that increases every day if they exchange photos. That number is private only to the users engaging in the streak. It is also voluntary. It aims to serve as a friendly reminder to keep in touch and strengthen those friendship bonds.
On addiction, it is worth reiterating that there is no nudge encouraging users to jump back into the app. We do not use push notifications to encourage people to keep up those streaks, so they are designed to celebrate friendships in that way. I hope that addresses the addiction question.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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Last week we heard from young people and some of them were online six to eight hours a day. That is far too much time for young people to be online. That is addictive, whether the witnesses like it or not.
In relation to TikTok, a study called Safer Scrolling conducted by teams at the University of Kent and University College London found that hateful and misogynistic material was being pushed on young people, with boys suffering from anxiety and poor mental health being most at risk. Do the witnesses dispute the findings of this study and if so, what measures are being taken to reduce misogynistic content on their platforms?
Mr. Richard Collard:
We can all agree that misogyny has no place in society and it has no place on our platform. We do view things from a cross-sectional lens. We understand that women and girls, by merit of who they are, face additional vulnerabilities and we want to limit that as much as possible. In terms of what we do up front, our community guidelines are really clear that we do not allow misogyny on the platform.
We do not allow non-consensual intimate imagery sharing. We do not allow cyber flashing, hate speech or the promotion of violence based on gender. We are using moderation tools to find and remove that as soon as possible. We remove 98% of content that violates our community guidelines before people see it. That is still not enough and we want to go further on that. We are also empowering people by giving a range of tools. I appreciate that tools are not always helpful on every occasion, because we want to have that complete baseline of no harm at all, but we do allow people the ability to make their accounts private, to restrict their content from selected users and to have reporting tools.
Aidan Farrelly (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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I thank everybody for accepting the invitation to be here this morning. It is important and, as the witnesses have heard from other members, it is on the back of having heard from many other stakeholders in this conversation, whether children and young people, youth workers or teachers. We all have our own biases, experiences and attitudes towards the work that the witnesses do, but ultimately, being here and having the engagement is a welcome start. I thank the witnesses in the first instance for being here and accepting that invitation.
I have learned that time gets away from us quickly in this setting. I will try to limit my questions to two and everybody can come in. That would be worthwhile. Given that the witnesses all work for and represent entities that are out to make a profit, is there ever a compromise between user safety, and specifically young people's safety, and the profit that their board of directors is out to achieve?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
If we take something like teen accounts, putting teens under additional protections and imposing requirements and restrictions on them, there is a clear and obvious risk that those teens will go to a platform that does not have the same number of restrictions in place. This is an example of where we made a decision to put the most positive experience in place for teens, in the knowledge that there is a likelihood that a certain number of them will move elsewhere. We are hoping that they will not. For our company, it is a longer term bet to ensure that this is the most positive place to be online for a teen.
Ms Susan Moss:
Our top priority is the promotion of a safe but also relevant experience for young people. To give an idea, in our Irish office, three quarters of our staff are entirely dedicated to safety. That gives an indication of where we are prioritising our business. It is a business, but not at all costs. Our most important job at TikTok is safety, which is represented through the additional billions we spend year on year on safety measures.
Ms Liz Thomas:
From a Microsoft perspective, there is a diversity of business under the brand name and portfolio. Perhaps the most salient aspect here is online gaming, where we regard safety as a fundamental part of the way we develop the business. Players coming and having a safe experience, and enjoying the gaming environment and wanting to be there, is part of what we bring to them.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
To reframe the question slightly, we have a strong business incentive to ensure user safety and, particularly, user trust. That is generally the way it operates in our case. It is not a case of trying to make trade-offs between profit and safety. We have been in business for over 20 years and have built up billions of users around the globe. We want them to continue to come back because they have a positive, healthy experience on our platform. It is built into our business incentive to take action to protect all users, particularly our younger users.
Ms Freddie Cook:
I echo some of what has been said. The safety experience for teens is a business priority and there are not any trade-offs where that is concerned. Regarding where revenue comes in, some of our biggest commercial clients are advertising products that are completely unsuitable for under-18s, which gives an indication of how we treat the teen experience differently from the over-18 one. I echo the comments made more generally.
Aidan Farrelly (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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It is really heartening to hear the sentiment with regard to safety. That is important, but we might go one step further and consider an action that the witnesses could all take as a tangible step from today. Would they consider having a button on every interface that would allow a user, specifically a young person, to automatically send a complaint about their experience to Coimisiún na Meán while they are interacting with the witnesses' platforms? Would they give users that opportunity, given how important safety is and given the investment that they are all making internally, which I really welcome? What we have heard so often from young people is that the investigation process can be frustrating and the timeframe for complaints can be challenging. Would the witnesses give users a simple button to click on their user interface, which their companies can enact soon, that would give them a link directly to Coimisiún na Meán to share their experience, highlight the problem and report a user? Would they be open to that? They might give a yes-no answer, given the short time, if they do not mind.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
I do not think that is something we would do, for the reason that requirements are set down in law about what we need to explain to users if they are making a complaint under, for example, the Digital Services Act. That runs in parallel to our own reporting structure for our community standards. I cannot see us making that step at this stage.
Ms Liz Thomas:
In the first instance, we are applying a set of Microsoft policies which, in many cases, may actually go further than local law and, depending on the platform, may be quite restrictive. For example, gaming is not something that we treat as a free speech platform. There is a little complexity and a context-specific issue.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
The current regulatory framework places the onus on us as platforms to have reporting tools in place that are user-friendly, and that is the primary responsibility. That is the route we were pursuing even before the regulation came in to ensure there were user-friendly reporting tools backed up by policy enforcement. That is the appropriate way to go. Coimisiún na Meán, under the different regulations, has a role in overseeing the effectiveness of those tools. That is the appropriate way for it to work.
Ms Freddie Cook:
I reiterate that we fully appreciate that the processes can be frustrating for users at times. At Snap we are constantly working on readability to make sure that young users, in particular, feel that they can report, that the report will go somewhere and that we are constantly communicating with them on that front. Regarding a direct line to regulators, I cannot give a "Yes" or "No", but we are constantly thinking about how to make the reporting process more streamlined and better for users generally.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for being here. I have an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old, so this is highly relevant to me. Sometimes I do not know if I know too much or too little about online harms. I think that is what many parents feel. I hope this report can help parents and children to navigate social media responsibly and feel that they have more control over it, because it feels like we are powerless to a certain extent. I know the witnesses have appeared before many committees recently, so I want to go down a different route and talk to Microsoft about its Xbox gaming revenue. What proportion of its gaming revenue comes from in-game purchases, downloadable content, subscriptions and microtransactions, as opposed to the initial sale of the game itself?
Ms Liz Thomas:
I thank the Deputy for the question and appreciate where she is coming from. I do not think we have the breakdown but the point she is raising is an important contextually for these conversations.
A large proportion of the business model here for us is not about time spent on platform. It is around selling titles people enjoy, and interesting and creative work that people want to come in and play with.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Does Microsoft track how much revenue is generated by users aged under 18?
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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It would be good for us to understand what is happening in that area. We need to stay on top of that.
Does Ms Thomas think that mechanics such as loot boxes, streak rewards, rotating item shops and timed engagement incentives are designed to maximise player retention and spending?
Ms Liz Thomas:
From our perspective, this goes to the whole context of the way modern games work today. Again, it is not about time spent on platform but the way we are setting players up to have a complete experience. That includes things like gameplay but also optional purchases. We are aware this is an area where parents will have questions, so we think of it from a safety perspective as a combination of transparency, player choice and also parental controls. We want to make sure players and families really understand what is offered and can make informed decisions. That does include providing disclosures when randomised items might be present, but also defaults and controls that allow parents to track and manage spending. For example, for child accounts spending is not permitted and parents have strong controls over that.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Does Ms Thomas think parents know about all of these mechanics on Xbox? Has Microsoft done any research?
Ms Liz Thomas:
For the last ten years, we have done a piece of annual research which we have called our global online safety survey. One of the pivots we have made over recent years is to ask a little more from parents around their awareness of parental controls and tools. Generally, the challenge that was identified earlier this morning is the same here, namely, that parents are busy, there is a lot of complexity here and it can be hard for people to find. We have taken steps to really try to make sure we are making this accessible. Part of that has been developing a gaming safety toolkit which is intended to help simplify thinking about parental controls. It is a set of guardrails but one that can be deployed in the context of a holistic approach to digital parenting. It is saying not only that these tools are available but here are the ways parents might want to use them with a child or teenager as part of the overall family conversation on time online, on spending and on age-appropriate content and really understanding how the parent might want to talk about that, relative to each family, their values, the maturity of the children and other key factors.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Has Microsoft done any specific research into the addictive or compulsive effects of the mechanics?
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Does Ms Thomas think that kind of chance-based reward system is exposing children to gambling-like behaviours?
Ms Liz Thomas:
We would not necessarily put it in those terms. When you think about gameplay there are tasks and interactive experiences that are part of a journey of problem-solving and working away through a challenge and navigating what it means to be a player in those environments. We would see it as part of the whole piece of what it looks like to be in modern gaming.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Has Microsoft considered restrictions?
Ms Liz Thomas:
We have developed some voluntary principles over the years, working with others in industry, and we continue to think carefully about these mechanics. We want to take an evidence-based approach. We want to be thoughtful about what it means to have age-appropriate experiences on these platforms, but we are thinking about it as part of a holistic approach to safety where this is coupled with that transparency and guidance for parents.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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On the length of time kids might stay on Xbox, does Microsoft have research on that?
Ms Liz Thomas:
Not that I am aware of but this is something that has really picked up through our parental controls, so parents have the ability, through that parental control suite, to set time limits and get activity reporting. They can also grant additional screen time. The Xbox app enables kids to send a request to parents if they want to come back onto a gaming platform. That is something that is wrapped up as part of that suite of parental controls, which is allowing a holistic approach to where gaming sits in a family's life.
Emer Currie (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I am one of those parents who puts on parental controls for watching time limits and then I see them being ignored. I thank Ms Thomas for answering those questions.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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I thank everyone for coming in. It is great to get their perspective. I thank them for the information.
As others have said, we have had a number of different witnesses, including young people and youth organisations, and the addictive nature of platforms has come up over and over again. A lot of young people have a love-hate relationship with social media use, as do I. I know we do not want to talk about the specifics of the case but the ruling in the Meta case in March has definitely shifted the responsibility from the user to the platform. The ruling was that there is addictive design and negligence by design because of the addictive nature of it. The fact that Meta is appealing the case means it does not agree there is negligence by design. If that is the case, would Meta consider it a good idea to have, as a default setting, autoplay, infinite scrolling and push notifications turned off rather than turned on? I put that question to Mr. Collard too. It has been proven over and over that it is of a addictive nature because of infinite scrolling and autoplay.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
On the court case, as the Senator said, we respectfully disagree with the ruling and we will appeal it. Separate from that, in terms of the features we have brought in, they are targeting the problematic use which is coming to the fore in the conversations we have been having with safety experts, parents and a whole range of stakeholders around the world.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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What measures has Meta brought in?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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What about autoplay?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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What about infinite scrolling?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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What is the minimum it can be brought down to?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
It is zero, as far as I know. I will confirm that in writing afterwards. The other way that can be set is in relation to what content is appearing in the feed, giving both the teen and the parent a way of controlling what content they are seeing in the feed. As I said earlier, they are already in this 13-plus type of content but the parents can go a step further and limit that content further. There is a whole range of things-----
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Autoplay is still in place, though. Even if you have a time limit on it, you can automatically still-----
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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I will stick with Meta. Through algorithms, is there targeted advertising? Does Meta use targeted advertising for children?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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There is no advertising on Instagram?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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I will ask Mr. Collard the same questions. First, infinite scrolling and autoplay have come up a lot in this conversation as a problematic feature of TikTok.
Mr. Richard Collard:
The Senator is completely right to focus on design features and which of them are appropriate for teens and which are not.
We have looked at the evidence on this and the evidence is really clear that some features like direct messaging and going live are really risky. That is why we have taken specific steps to restrict those for our youngest users.
When it comes to scroll, for us, that is about a making a conscious decision. It is not just about continuing to watch; it is about people skipping things they do not like, not necessarily harmful content but content that they are just not interested in. We think that is an appropriate mechanism to say, "Actually, I don't want to watch this; I want to watch something else."
With autoplay-----
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Autoplay is a huge problem.
Mr. Richard Collard:
All we will say is that autoplay is not on by default because you have to skip to the next video and then a video will play. Regardless of whether you are logged in or logged out, if you are on TikTok and you watch a video, it will not play you a new video; you have to make that conscious choice to move to another one.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Mr. Collard, therefore, does not think it is addictive. He does not think the nature of TikTok is designed to be addictive to keep people on the platform.
Mr. Richard Collard:
No, I do not think I have seen a clinical diagnostic of addiction. What we have is a platform that tries to recommend videos that we think people will find useful or interesting, whether it is for education or just fun. It is a place for people to explore those different topics that interest them.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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How about targeted advertising? Does TikTok use deliberate advertising for children?
Ms Liz Thomas:
I will take that question. We have both a moral obligation and a legal obligation to protect younger users when it comes to advertising. Under the Digital Services Act we are prohibited by law from servicing advertisements to teenagers under the age of 18 based on profiling, so it is not permitted. As a company, we also make a decision around the types of advertising we permit on our platform. We do not permit everything. We have restrictions on HFSS, for example. The advertising revenue that is generated from teenagers is actually almost negligible in Ireland.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Does Ms Thomas have figures on that and how much that-----
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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She might provide it later. That would be great.
Do the witnesses agree with the social media ban for under-16s? How does Mr. Ó Broin feel about a ban for under-16s in Ireland?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
It depends on, first, what we are talking about and, second, what we are trying to achieve. Australia has brought in a certain model targeting a number of companies. What we have seen there is that other apps are being used, perhaps apps that do not have the same number of safety restrictions and do not have the same amount of regulation - let us be clear about it. If we are trying to achieve an ecosystem solution to ensuring that parents are involved in deciding which apps are not being used by their children, and basing that decision on what are the safety tools that are in place on each of those services, the OS-level solution we have been talking about would be the way forward. It would also not allow for the VPN-type workaround being used in Australia. That is why we think that is the right solution, but we are not dogmatic. If there is something else, great.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I will deal with the issue of addiction as well first. I have heard the witnesses' responses to much of the commentary about it, particularly their response to the court case in America that was mentioned earlier. However, I am much more concerned by the findings of the European Commission because that is the jurisdiction in which we operate under the DSA. I take its findings seriously and I am not sure that the witnesses' responses to the questions today give me any satisfaction that they have taken its preliminary findings seriously or that they acknowledge them. The European Commission found that TikTok is in breach of the Digital Services Act for its addictive design. TikTok fails "to implement reasonable, proportionate and effective measures to mitigate risks stemming from its addictive design". Those are the preliminary findings of the Commission. I have listened carefully to the contributions so far. I apologise for attending late but I have been following it. As I said, I am not sure I have been advised that these companies have done enough to dispel the Commission's preliminary findings. The time management tools "do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok". These are young people, and the findings, preliminary findings though they may be, of an independent regulatory body have been that TikTok's tools "do not seem to be effective in enabling users to reduce and control their use of TikTok". That is alarming and I am not sure that the witnesses' responses today have been sufficient in reassuring me that the companies are taking that seriously.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I just want to come in before the witnesses respond. I acknowledge that there are live investigations going on. The witnesses do not have to comment on them but they can talk to the topics.
Mr. Richard Collard:
I reiterate that we do take these findings incredibly seriously. Because they are preliminary findings, I am limited in what I can say on the scope of that case. It is something we disagree with. Let me talk to the Deputy about how we see the recommendation algorithm and then some of the steps we are taking to help people have control over their screen time. The algorithm, for us, is about making sure that people find content that is relevant to them, whether that is something that they stay on the platform and look at or whether they take it outside of the platform. There is good evidence that people are using TikTok to find new hobbies like going on hikes around Lough Tay, for instance. We acknowledge, however, that screen time is something that parents and children care a lot about, and that is why we have put in a range of different solutions to help people manage their control. We have a 60-minute screen time cap by default for everyone under 18. That is an industry first and something we are proud of. In addition, we stopped sending push notifications at night time, so if you are a teen on the platform, if you are under 16, they stop at 9 p.m., and if you are over 18 they stop at 10 p.m.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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The preliminary findings - and I accept they are preliminary - of the European Commission are that these tools "are easy to dismiss and introduce limited friction".
Mr. Richard Collard:
I think we would view them as a turnstile. The 60-minute screen time cap has a full-screen takeover. If you are on the platform for more than 60 minutes, you will be expected to enter a passcode. Teens will have that passcode, and it is about making sure we have this friction that people continue to have mindful and intentional use of the platform. It is worth acknowledging that this is a sectoral issue. If we are considering solutions, whether someone is spending one minute on TikTok watching a video or 60 minutes on TikTok watching videos, we still have that screen time cap and we think that is an effective tool. The evidence we have commissioned from independent organisations backs up that people do value having tools to help limit and manage their own control and set their own limits. In addition, for our family pairing tools, we have the ability for parents to set hard limits on their experience. They could say ten minutes, for instance, on an evening after school and 30 minutes on the weekends. If a teen uses past that ten minutes, they cannot even log out of the app, so it is a real, hard lockdown on their experience.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Another point made by my colleague Senator Murphy O'Mahony some time ago was that the other finding is that parental controls may not be effective because they require additional time and skills from parents to introduce the controls. Should that not compel the company to make these controls more user friendly, particularly for, as the Senator pointed out, parents who may not have the technical know-how?
Mr. Richard Collard:
I agree with the Deputy that parental controls need to be as simple as possible, and that is something we continue to look at: how can we make our tools better and adopted by more people. We are commissioning research with the University of East London to help understand the barriers to parents using parental controls and the barriers to their adopting and using this at scale because we think it is a really important tool. That being said, regardless of whether a teen has a parent who is using the app or is tech savvy, we want them to have that default good experience.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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There was a similar finding in relation to Meta, that it does not "provide users simple mechanisms to notify illegal content" and that the "mechanisms to flag and remove illegal content may be ineffective". Much of our debate has been about the content that young people are encountering online. I think it was Deputy Farrelly who mentioned the ease of notifying the authorities of where you might find harmful content but even still, should it not equally concern Meta that a body such as the European Commission would come to such a preliminary finding?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
We take the views of any regulator extremely seriously, whether it gets to the point of preliminary findings or not. We will engage, and we are engaging, with the European Commission on all the investigations that are open. In relation to the reporting thing, it is important that our own community standards actually go far beyond the law, for example.
For example, if you just had what is illegal and that was the bar for which you were removing content online, I do not think people would be very happy. Our community standards go significantly beyond that in terms of removing types of content-----
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Even though it is challenging to notify the appropriate authorities of them, be they legal or illegal.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Anybody who has used social media in the last time, particularly anybody who has used TikTok, could not but say that it is utterly addictive. It keeps you scrolling. I imagine that is the whole point of it. Whether we have preliminary findings or not is beside the point. If you talk to any element of young people like the ones we had before the committee, they will say they understand that they get in, that they get locked in and they keep scrolling. Then the issue is the recommender settings. It is very difficult to accept that any of the witnesses are doing what they need to do. It is as simple as this. My understanding of this business is these corporations keep people on as long as possible. That is how they generate money. On some level, they do not really care how that happens. Nothing is going to tell me differently.
It would be fair to say, and parents and everyone without technical skills falls down on this, that if you think of computer gaming and it is Christmas Day and you just need the game to work, if you have to use your own email address, you do that. The kid suddenly has access to that. Therefore, I imagine a considerable number of the children or those under 18 on these platforms are probably in and registered as adults. They are operating on the basis of the recommender settings. You go in and you might look at something in relation to an issue that is happening in a constituency or whatever. We can think of some of the issues over the last number of years, and you will get a feed from an incident and then it will be followed up by a stream of madness. Every village idiot and lunatic has a forum now that is utterly unchecked and you keep getting this stuff.
It is no shock that Facebook was found to be liable in America. I get that the witnesses will say that they do not accept those findings. First, what are the platforms doing in relation to this? I have not heard anything that is impacting. I will go to Mr. Ó Broin and then to TikTok. I do not see what is done at the minute is sufficient for the protection of children. We are relying on parents who may not have the technical capacity and for a million other reasons. The responsibility lies with these corporations. The fact is, this business model works on the basis that people are kept online for as long as possible. That is how the corporations make money. I am not wrong in that, am I?
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I get the idea of recommender settings and the platforms want to give people the content they want. We have all seen it. You know the stuff that moves online. It is generally hate. It is taking people down really negative rabbit holes that they are already down. We are talking specifically about children. I imagine that a considerable number of the children who are on are probably registered as adults at the minute. Is that fair to say?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
We take a range of measures when it comes to managing age. We announced some further measures on Tuesday of steps that were taken to use AI to ensure that the users, even if they have given over-18 age dates, are being put back into the most restrictive accounts or even deactivated, if they are continuously doing that. On the Deputy's point on parents being overwhelmed, we agree with that. We are trying to find what is the most effective solution for the ecosystem. This is our idea. That is why we are suggesting there may be another-----
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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The app store.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I get that. We have limited time. I understand that is what you have said as your proposal, but we are where we are now. What can be done for the person who is registered as being over 18 who is not over 18? What is being done for adults who do not necessarily always have the skill sets they should have when it comes to getting this stream of nonsense?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
There are a range of measures we take in relation to detecting age and ensuring we put those users into the correct category. Teen accounts is probably the safest experience that people can have online as teenagers. We are trying to ensure we continuously improve on that and that we continuously improve on the age detection measures we have. However, we still need to have that other solution in place, the other signal coming from the app store solution.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I get it, but I am not wrong on recommender settings. If you are on the adult setting, they will keep throwing information at you that catches your attention. In some cases, this will be hate or whatever else. It can be very unhealthy for an awful lot of people, but it does keep them online and that is beneficial to the witnesses' business model.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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There is a considerable amount of stuff that can be found online. It would not take us very long to go on and find stuff that is utterly unacceptable. I am not entirely sure what gets someone banned and what does not and how long it takes for that to happen.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
We are moving on to various issues. If our enforcement system works, a lot of that is taken down automatically. The Deputy is saying unacceptable, but where are we there? It is unacceptable, but is it still acceptable for an over-18 to be able to see that? Is it harmful or illegal? Certainly, illegal content needs to come down. Anything violating our community standards needs to come down. There will be content online for adults that-----
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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That is it. There is limited time. I have the same question for TikTok.
Mr. Richard Collard:
In terms of the Deputy's question about people being on the platform who are children or teens and who might be registered as adults, we are taking steps to identify those and remove them. We use AI technology to predict the age of users. If their date of birth is different from the age that they have provided on sign-up, we will send them to one of our team who looks at accounts. They will look to either remove them to a-----
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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It would be fairly easy to get around though, would it not?
Mr. Richard Collard:
I disagree with that. We would also remove a significant number of under-13s who are on our platform through circumvention. We are removing in the millions globally every month to make sure. We also move people down from 18+ experiences to 16 to 17 if we think that is what their age is. We are taking significant steps to do that. When it comes to the recommender algorithm, we do have a number of steps in place. We are removing content that breaks community guidelines if it is illegal or harmful content. If there is content that may not be necessarily harmful when viewed in isolation but in concentration, which I think is what the Deputy was getting at with some of this - an overload of different types of content - we take steps to disperse that so a user will not be getting concentrated stream of content of one different type. We also allow people to reset the algorithm.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Collard. We might come back to this in the second round.
I acknowledge, and it is clear to me, that everybody in the room is very interested in the safety and well-being of children. It is clear to me that a lot of work is being done, whether that is using technology in AI or the outreach work the corporations are doing. It is also very clear, from all the witnesses who have appeared before us in recent weeks and the work I have done in surveys, that we are not where we need to be. There are VPNs. There are different ways where content needs to be removed. Kids are getting around the system and then we have to remove them.
We are not there yet. Until we are there, what do we do in the short term? Australia introduced a ban. I want to hear the opinions of the witnesses on a ban. Given that we have a store in the room because Google has the Play store and Meta proposes age verification should be at site in a store, I would like to understand the views of Google compared to those of Meta. We do not have the Apple app store in the room. Why does Meta think age verification should take place at the Play store and how does the Play store feel about that?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
I do not mean to get into a row with Mr. Meade or Ms Setter. We need to take a step back and ask what is needed. What is needed is an age signal that can be relied on. There are concerns around privacy, etc. and everyone looking at IDs, apps looking at IDs and different ways of doing that. A consistent age signal that can be anonymised and encrypted, and which does not need to state a person is aged 16, 17 or 18, can state that a line of code is sent shows that the person falls within the 16 or 17 age bracket but those aged 13 to 15 do not. We then try to identify the points in the ecosystem where we can introduce something like that which does not require us to have that across the 44 apps that have been mentioned.
As we understand it, a certain amount of this is already happening at the app store. Therefore it would make sense for that verification to happen once when a device is being set up and the signal can then be shared with all of the apps in the app store. A number of US states and Brazil have introduced these requirements. It may be that there is another way of doing this. We need to walk through it in terms of making it as easy as possible for parents and as privacy-protected as possible. We must not put all of the pressure on the app stores to keep all of the users safe, as that still rests with us. This is where it makes most sense.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I take it from that comment that its age-assurance systems cannot be relied on. I would like to hear what the Google Play store has to say about that.
Ms Chloe Setter:
We recognise that age assurance is a complex issue, possibly the most complex issue I have worked on in my 15 years working in child protection. It is critical to delivering age-appropriate experiences. We deploy age assurance on our products.
Directly addressing the proposals around app stores, we would argue that this is a flawed and ineffective proposal. The service level responsibility already exists and is enshrined under the Digital Services Act. I cannot help but feel this is a cynical attempt to shift responsibility elsewhere and put the responsibility onto the app store. That is denying the responsibility each individual platform has under law to protect and know their users. They are best placed to know not only who the people using the services are but also the risk profile on their platforms. It is not for us to gatekeep every single app in existence. The age of people entering a shopping mall is not checked. It would be checked at the point of purchase in a shop selling alcohol. It is a similar analogy.
The reason I have said the proposal is ineffective is because apps are not the only way the content is accessed. Websites, for example, provide content. Any kind of app store solution would not cover websites. Children would not be protected in order that they have age-appropriate experiences on websites. Many apps come pre- or side-loaded onto phones when they are bought and are not downloaded from the app store. There are privacy issues around sharing age data across every single app in the app store. We recognise that it is important. We already carry out age assurance at the Play store level and across all of our services.
As soon as someone opens a Google account, if they claim to be an adult we run a machine learning estimation model, something we have had in place since 2020 in the EU. That means that if we are not certain someone is an adult, we treat them as a minor until we are confident that they are an adult. We take a range of signals to do that, including how long they have had their email account, their search history, the things they are watching and whether they have credit cards on file. That helps us to establish with confidence whether they are aged over 18.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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What is the opinion of TikTok on that?
Ms Susan Moss:
We do not take a position on one solution per se. The one-stop shop in the app store sounds like a prudent idea. However, we agree that there should be a suite of tools available to organisations like ours. For example, when it comes to those aged under 13, TikTok consulted extensively with the Data Protection Commission on an under-13 model over a number of years. That is the future in terms of keeping those aged under 13 off our platform.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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What about Snapchat?
Ms Freddie Cook:
To reiterate, we are supportive of a more app store level of solution to tackle this industry-wide problem. It is worth noting that in the UK, Apple, which I know is not present, recently introduced age checks for 18 plus. That is a good signal that the technology is available and it will be helpful in supporting our age-assurance mechanisms to be able to rely on that strong signal.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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What does Microsoft think?
Edward Timmins (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for coming before the committee and putting themselves in the public domain, which is commendable. However, we are faced with two fundamental problems and challenges in terms of how successful we can be. The companies the witnesses work for are massively profit driven. That is their bottom line: to increase their shareholder value in the short term. That is their aim and goal and that drives how they do everything. All of the other issues we are discussing are nice, but that is the starting point.
With all due respect to the witnesses, I know exactly how they feel. I worked in business for 30 years. When one works for a company, one is paid by the company and one has to defend it. That is their job and I understand that completely. Regarding their paymasters in the US or whatever, these companies are potentially building up massive legal claims down the road. This will ultimately undermine shareholder value. In ten years' time in this country and across the world, we will ask how we let all of this out-of-control stuff happen. I appreciate the witnesses are doing their best and are doing great things, but they are limited. The driver for their organisation is not what we are about here today. The driver is something different, including addiction, how long people spend online, etc.
Having said all of that, I want to ask a question of each of the four main platforms, not including Microsoft. Someone mentioned that 100 million pieces of content are uploaded each day and 1% of that is potentially harmful. That is 1 million pieces of content a day. The numbers are extraordinary, including the number of children impacted. The witnesses have said they are putting many things in place. Is there any evidence that things are getting better in terms of age verification, parental control and the length of time children stay on apps? Do statistics show what direction things are going in? It is like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Have we seen improvements in terms of total volume? I do not mean that more people are being controlled, but rather total volumes. The population of the world is growing and the figures are building all the time. Is there evidence that things are getting any better in terms of the volume of kids being affected and consuming this content with little or no control?
Ms Susan Moss:
I thank the Deputy for the question. It is only right that he is holding us to the fire on this. The most obvious indicator of how things are improving are the independent audits carried out by the European Commission, where assessments are done on an annual basis. We all release transparency reports on a multiannual basis.
Our artificial intelligence models a number of years ago were 60% accurate; today they are over 90% accurate. That means we know we are catching more content than we did previously when we had a mix of people and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is helping us remove more potentially violative content than it ever did before. Our reporting timeline has reduced so, on average, we are able to remove content within two hours of it being notified to us by people in Ireland. We are able to increase the proactive removal rate. Today over 98% of violative videos on TikTok are removed before anyone reports them.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
As I mentioned in response to Deputy Farrelly, we are a business and we are in the business of developing value for shareholders but also of developing user trust. For that reason, we have a strong business incentive to create safe online experiences. That is what drives our work-----
Edward Timmins (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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You would be sued down the road, anyway, if you did not.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
That is another important consideration. We take very seriously our legal obligations, whether that is regulation or other issues. Those factors definitely play a part. It is not simply a case of maximising short-term profit.
On the Deputy's question on improvements, I will mention two things. For tracking improvements, on YouTube we have a metric we developed called violative view rate. This is how our teams internally are incentivised to improve performance in terms of catching material that may violate our policies. We track the number of views on content that is ultimately removed and try to keep that number as low as possible. Our most recent figure for that is a rate of 0.14%. That means that for every 10,000 views, 14 would be violations.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
Deputy Farrelly asked a similar question. Through teen accounts, we are creating the safest environment for teens on the Internet. We recognise that may lead to teens not being happy with restrictions and moving to other apps, but for us it is a longer term view because we want the most positive experience. We also have examples from transparency reports and stuff like that. There is significant improvement in AI but it is not just AI. We have made significant changes. We have fundamentally changed how teens experience our platforms. I see that as a significant improvement.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Go raibh maith agat. We are going into the second round but we still have a full room. I am giving members three minutes each and ask them to be clever about it. I will be very strict. Make sure there is time for the questions to be answered in the three minutes.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I ask Ms Cook why the messages disappear on Snapchat. Surely this is ripe for bullying and it means parents cannot monitor.
Ms Freddie Cook:
The messages disappear by default though I will flag that users can change that setting, if they want, to either an hour or a few days. We did that because we wanted snap to basically replicate day-to-day conversations. If you were at school, work or wherever else, there would not be a written record of what had been shared or exchanged. That is the overall premise behind that design choice.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I will come back to that another day. In terms of misinformation, disinformation and defamation across platforms, what is Meta doing to address accuracy of information and encourage critical thinking?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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They are still up there.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I am still seeing it, and I have a boring feed. What about TikTok? It is not working; it has to do something better.
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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How long does that take?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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I think there is content up there for a lot longer. As I said, I have a very boring feed and I am seeing serious misinformation, disinformation and defamation across all TikTok's platforms. It is not working; TikTok has to do something better. Because there are so many anonymous posters, even in terms of trying to take civil litigation, it is impossible for people who have been defamed to find out who the anonymous posters were. What steps will TikTok look at?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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If I am defamed, how do I find out who is the person defaming me?
Grace Boland (Dublin Fingal West, Fine Gael)
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How long does that take?
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Go raibh maith agat. Now we go to Deputy Dempsey.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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Going back to Snapchat, how long does the app store the information that disappears within the hour or the days - Ms Cook said the user can change the setting - in the event a user reports an incident of bullying or sharing of a sexually explicit image?
Ms Freddie Cook:
It would depend on the circumstances around the report. If the user reports via the app, we have the ability to bring forward that information and investigate it more closely. It depends on the type of content as well. There are different settings for a snap - that is, a photo - or written content. The information we would be able to bring back up for further investigation would be very context dependent.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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Snapchat does not have a timeframe for how long it keeps data in the app.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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That would be great. I thank Ms Cook.
We talked earlier about people working in this area in the witnesses' organisations. Does any of them have a full team working in this area? What kind of numbers work in the child safety area?
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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Is there a team?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
There is a broad team in relation to operations and enforcement and there are much smaller teams depending on specific harm. In child safety, for example, there are clinical experts, etc. They are the lower part of the funnel and the operations, etc., would be the larger part above.
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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We have talked at length about the measures the witnesses' organisations take after people sign up to verify they are the age they say they are. Are they all waiting for legislation to come in on more robust measures before people are signed up? Will any of them consider being proactive, like Meta has been with the teen accounts, at the risk of losing users by introducing ID control or parental consent?
Aisling Dempsey (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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What about before they get that far?
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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We could go over and back on age verification and have a bun fight between Google, Apple and other platforms but the fact is kids will have access to this material. If you were to give somebody this laptop, they will not have to worry about the App Store or whatever. The other issue is we often give kids phones so they have access to our accounts.
Until we have proper dealing on the recommender settings and the profiling information, we are getting nowhere on this.
I want to ask Snapchat in particular, because the idea was brought up with us, about groups being formed on Snapchat for the purpose of bullying somebody, only for the messages to then disappear. Does an issue that arises need to be followed up by the police force? I am told it is incredibly difficult to deal with Snapchat. What is the process?
Ms Freddie Cook:
I thank the Deputy for the question. I am sorry to hear about the police force issue. I am happy to work with the Deputy on that after this session if there are particular instances he can share. Again, bullying is completely against our community guidelines. There is no place for it on Snapchat, online or offline generally.
On group chats, we created the function because our community wanted a space to connect in, whether with classmates, sports clubs or otherwise. That is why they exist.
We are constantly evolving the protections available, particularly for teens. For example, we are aware that teens can be added to or removed from group chats, and we know there is the potential for bad actors or bullies to bring people in and then maybe remove them. That is something we are considering very closely. We are building protections to work out whether teens should be able to quietly exit a group if they do not want to be part of it or whether we should switch off the notification that is shared with other users still in the group. That is a very live conversation we are having. I would imagine that, in the next couple of months, we will have some product changes in that regard, which I would be happy to share with the committee.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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How easy is it to report non-consensual intimate imagery, some of which can obviously relate to children, and how quickly does it get taken down? We will start with Mr. Ó Broin.
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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Right. Complaints would indicate something else. What is the response of TikTok?
Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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What are the responses of Snapchat and Google?
Margaret Murphy O'Mahony (Fianna Fail)
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Microsoft places a strong emphasis on education and programmes like Dream Space. What evidence shows that these initiatives translate into real-world improvements in children's online safety and well-being, rather than children simply being aware that the programme is available?
Mr. Ciarán Conlon:
This is a really interesting public policy discussion generally, and I want to recognise that. From the outset, when Microsoft set up its campus in Leopardstown, it realised that part of its responsibility as a corporate citizen in the country was to start making its contribution on the skills front. That is why it introduced Dream Space in 2018. We have recruited teachers to run the programme, so they are not Microsoft people. We have partnered with the Department of Education and Youth, Maynooth University, SOLAS and Research Ireland on the programmes. We have a programme called STEM Passport for Inclusion, which targets young girls because of the gap between the genders in progression to STEM courses and so forth. We have seen really tangible progress in STEM Passport for Inclusion. It gives accreditation for young girls who take the programme through Dream Space. It is now recognised in CAO applications. The programme is resulting in a much higher percentage of girls. Between 5,000 and 6,000 girls have taken the programme, and they are 70% to 80% more likely to pursue a STEM course as a result.
The other aspect is baking in the standard situational and circumstantial awareness and knowledge base, because all our children have just dived straight into this environment. As parents, or anyone interested in the well-being of children, we want them to be aware of and understand the environment they are operating in. We are almost having to backfill what would have happened naturally in another circumstance. The 500,000 kids who have come through Dream Space have benefited.
I invite the committee members to visit the campus in Leopardstown, if they would like to. They would be very welcome to join us and we would be happy to facilitate that.
We are baking into the standard STEM programme an educational element about online safety, situational awareness and risk assessment. We are not just teaching the children how they might have a STEM career. We are also trying to teach as many as we can how to be aware and alert in the same way as when your child is going to a playground, crossing the road or doing the basic things where we try to embed awareness. By making the programme multi-annual – we are eight years in now and have invested €12 million – our aim is to keep building it, working with our strategic partners.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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I thank the witnesses for answering all our questions. They are responsible for our children when it comes to the time they spend online, but there is also parental responsibility. Many parents are using digital devices to parent their children, and parents are buying their children laptops, tablets and mobile phones at younger and younger ages.
I want to talk about rage baiting. There was a BBC programme in March called “Inside the Rage Machine”, in which whistleblowers stated that companies, especially Meta and TikTok, were allowing more harmful content on people's feeds. Internal research revealed that outrage fuels engagement. Do the witnesses counter these claims, and how can the public be assured that they are taking the online safety of children seriously when such claims emerge?
What is the witnesses' responsibility for taking illegal websites down, particularly when they relate to pornographic material, trafficking and, in some cases, child trafficking? Do they rely on the Government to take action to tell them to take them down? I am basically referring to Escort Ireland. Many young people would-----
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Senator Keogan should not mention a business here.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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Okay. I am referring to a website that lists a number of women who may have been trafficked into this country. What is the responsibility of the witnesses' companies? We will begin with Google.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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Websites that are offering a service that is illegal in this country. What is Google's responsibility?
Mr. Ryan Meade:
As the Senator will appreciate, if we do not host those websites, we cannot take them down. However, if they attempt to post content on products we host, and that content either violates our guidelines or is illegal, we will remove it. We have reporting mechanisms to facilitate that.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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But it has not been removed.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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I am referring to a particular website offering a service that is illegal in this country.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I do not know if this is relevant to the topic.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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Children do access these websites. They are there to be seen. Minors can search for sex for sale, or whatever they want.
Sharon Keogan (Independent)
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I will definitely do that. Could TikTok and Meta respond to my question on rage baiting?
Ms Susan Moss:
We would dispute the findings in the study but, generally speaking, we implement a safety-by-design approach at TikTok. That ensures we are building protections for our younger users into every element of our product. Videos that do not pass our rigorous content-moderation policies are not eligible for recommendation in the For You feed.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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I have just one question. Am I right in thinking that autoplay is turned off on YouTube Kids?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Why is it not turned off for over-18s?
Young people can often access adult accounts, their parents' accounts for example. Parental consent means those between 13 and 18 cannot access it.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Is that from 18 up?
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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In regard to the addictive nature, why would it not be turned off?
Ms Chloe Setter:
We put those tools in to allow adults to customise their own experience. The tools that we put in place for young people under 18 are recognising those developmental needs such as needing tools to be off by default. That means they can choose to customise their own experience. It gives them flexibility.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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YouTube was involved in the ruling in LA around this issue and was found to be using addictive design.
Ms Chloe Setter:
As my colleague said, we refute the findings of that particular case. We do not believe it reflects the decades-long work we have done to invest in kids' spaces like YouTube Kids and trying to build age-appropriate experiences and tools that billions of people use every day. We do not see this as a fait accompli. We want to keep investing and keep getting better at this. Kids deserve that.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Having it automatically turned off could be something.
Ms Chloe Setter:
There has been a lot of talk about bans and restrictions. We did not get to answer that question earlier. The way we see that is that wholesale bans are not going to be an effective way of dealing with kids' safety. It is not going to incentivise platforms to do child safety work. We do not really believe that will work. Kids will just go to other spaces if just a handful of spaces are banned.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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In regard to YouTube shorts, in Ireland, as part of this committee, young persons are those aged up to 24. There is an argument around why it should not be set up to be automatically turned off. Autoplay could be a default for adult accounts, from 18 years upwards.
Nessa Cosgrove (Labour)
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Yes, the features-----
Ms Chloe Setter:
-----used to hold services. That is where maybe we need better controls and restrictions. That is why we brought in the YouTube Shorts timer - it was introduced fairly recently - which can allow parents to set that to zero. Autoplay is default off for under-18s. We have defaults on well-being tools.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I heard someone saying there is no advertising on the platform when the user is under 18. Is that the case for YouTube Kids? There is advertising.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Advertising is based on their behaviour.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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The data they have inputted into the system is used to generate advertising specific to them.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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What is the difference between targeted and profiling?
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank Ms Setter.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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There is advertising though.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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How about Snapchat?
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Is this relevant to Microsoft in the App Store? People download games on that.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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However, based on someone's behaviour or context, do they see adverts that-----
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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In the debate here today we have not really extended too much into the area of data. We have mainly focused on content, harmful content and what people are watching. Does TikTok monetise the data from young participants?
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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Then that is based on their profile.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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TikTok therefore is monetising the online behaviour of young people.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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That happens for all users.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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On that matter, if I tick on behalf of my child who is under 16 or over 13 to go on TikTok, am I giving TikTok the opportunity to sell their data?
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I mean personal data.
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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What about behavioural data?
John Connolly (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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What about Meta?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
We do not sell data to third parties. There is a fundamental issue. For over-18s there is sometimes a misunderstanding of how that works. We have the data and we protect the data. We keep it very close. There have been a number of cases over the years in relation to that. We match what the advertiser is trying to achieve with the user. That is not selling anything. Nothing is going to an advertiser. There is nothing being sold to the advertiser.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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It is now time for me to put my questions. I will then come back to each organisation for a one-minute closer.
I have two questions. The first one is to Microsoft and Snapchat and then the second one is to come back to anybody who has not come in yet for their thoughts on the ban.
In their opening statement, both Microsoft and Snapchat made reference to CSAM. In terms of CSAM and grooming, on which products does Microsoft most see that?
Ms Liz Thomas:
I appreciate the question. Child sexual abuse material is something we take incredibly seriously. Microsoft has a long history of addressing this, going back to the creation of photo DNA in 2009, which we have since made freely available across the ecosystem. It goes back again to a fundamental pillar of our approach which is that risks vary across services.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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In the interest of saving time, which product-----
Ms Liz Thomas:
In terms of grooming and what is most likely the highest risk here, we are cognisant that the environment in gaming can be a space where this is perhaps more likely. Again, we take that incredibly seriously. We use proactive detection technology to address proactively and mitigate that risk.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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In regard to Snapchat, where is that most prevalent? Is it on the stories or on direct messages? Where is it most prevalent?
Ms Freddie Cook:
It is most prevalent in the private spaces of Snapchat. If we identify instances involving CFCA and CSAM, whether that is through proactive detection or in-app reporting which is confidential, we remove that content, lock the account and report it to the national centre for missing and exploited children, NCMEC, which has been talked about quite a lot in this session. In terms of the tools we have available, we use advanced technology including photo DNA and Google's child sexual abuse imagery, CSAI, match. We are constantly working with the NCMEC team on how the quality of our reports can be improved, to improve its hashes and digital signatures.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank Ms Cook. Is there anyone who has not come in on their thoughts on the ban? Many countries are moving in that direction. We are hearing it is not the right way to go but I want members' thoughts on it.
Mr. Richard Collard:
I am happy to come in here. In TikTok, we do not support or oppose a ban. We are neutral. However, it is worth saying that badly designed legislation carries risks. If restrictions only apply to a certain number of platforms or a named list of platforms, or their exemptions, any risk will move to those platforms. It is therefore important that legislation is across the board and applies to a broad range of traditional social media, messaging platforms and gaming platforms.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Are there any other thoughts on that? What does Meta think about a ban?
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
It goes back to what the committee is trying to achieve. Is it trying to achieve safer environments for young children? Just saying "ban it" will not achieve that. I slightly push back on the back-and-forth we had with Ms Setter. We are not trying to put our responsibilities for having a safe online space onto anyone. We are looking for one additional signal to the other signals that we use to make our prediction of what the age is as firm as possible. However, the responsibility is still on us to ensure the age-appropriate experiences.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses. That is the end of the grilling for now. I thank everyone for their engagement. We are going to go in the order of Snapchat, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft and Google. They have one minute each for closing remarks on today's discussion.
Ms Freddie Cook:
I thank the Cathaoirleach and the members for the questions. I want to reiterate that we are very much open to these conversations, and very alive to all the issues that their constituents and perhaps the members themselves as parents will be facing.
We are always here and I am very happy for my details to be shared for any follow-up. I thank the committee again for the opportunity to speak and to represent.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
I am rarely lost for words but I do not have anything prepared for a closing statement. I thank the committee for its interest in this subject. I also commend it on the approach it has taken to ensure a broad range of stakeholders is invited and that children and youth advisory groups have an opportunity to contribute.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Does Mr. Ó Broin have any recommendations or next steps the committee should take? It would be helpful for the witnesses to outline these.
Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:
We are engaging on the question of age restriction but how age restriction contributes to a safer online environment is sometimes missed. We focus on the age question a lot but it is in service of achieving a safer online environment across a whole range of companies and services. Some of us are here today and others are not. It is how this would service a safer online environment.
Ms Susan Moss:
I thank the committee and the Cathaoirleach for that way they have engaged. We really do appreciate it. Whatever side of the debate we sit on, we are all in agreement that it is important teenagers have an age-appropriate experience. This is why we support evidence-based, sensible measures that improve safety standards for all users. Young people need to have an age-appropriate experience on social media, messaging apps and websites. It is really important to consider how this can be enacted practically.
Ms Liz Thomas:
I echo the thanks to the committee. We have heard thoughtful and informed questions today. It is fantastic that the committee has heard directly from young people. Their voices are a central part of this conversation to understand the risks and challenges they face but also the opportunity they see from technology. Microsoft's starting point is empowerment. We want to empower young people to use technology but we want them to be able to do this safely and mindfully because that is how they get to a place where they can maximise it to make the most of educational, social and economic opportunities. For us, part of this involves coming to a conversation where we are not necessarily thinking so much about restrictive approaches but about how we get empowerment through a really clear focus on safety by design and age-appropriate design in a risk-based and thoughtful way that recognises the differences in services but is also positioned in a whole-of-society environment, building up education, literacy and all of the other important factors so we get to a point where everybody has a role to play. Certainly, we have a core responsibility.
Mr. Ryan Meade:
I thank the committee for the discussion and its consideration of these issues in its recent hearings. We look forward to seeing its report. This is an urgent shared goal for many of us. At Google we are focused on protecting young people in the digital world and not from the digital world. That is the way we approach it. The thoughtful questions we have heard here today indicate there is a good deal of common ground and a good deal of progress that can be made. There is a lot of momentum at the moment towards measures such as bans but we feel there is a better way through focusing on safety by design and features. We also think good progress has been made, which we did not get a chance to speak about, on the issue of credential-based age assurance and I will ask Ms Setter to say a few words on this before we finish.
Ms Chloe Setter:
We have rightly focused a lot on the harms around technology today but there is some reason to be hopeful about some of the solutions that technology can bring to help us protect young people. Among these are ecosystem solutions for age assurance. Over the past 18 months we have been developing application programme interfaces that allow the private sharing of age signals between developers. This is something we are open sourcing so that anyone can use it but not profit from it. It is free. This aligns with the movement we are seeing across the European Union, including in Ireland, towards the digital-based age credentials in wallets. This can be quite a transformative way of assuring age in high-risk cases, for example accessing pornography, where we need to know age. It can be a really useful tool for protecting minors and we are happy to engage with the Irish Government on this.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Would Snapchat also like to give a recommendation because I had not given that preface when I asked Ms Cook for a closing statement?
Ms Freddie Cook:
We are fully aligned with what has been shared already about social media bans. It is very important that the committee and the Irish Government broadly look to both sides of the coin when it comes to the Australia test case. We have concerns but there are opportunities to take lessons from how this law has been implemented and how it is going. That is my one broad recommendation and I thank the Cathaoirleach for the opportunity.
Keira Keogh (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I thank all of the witnesses for coming before the committee today. We have had robust debate but we are all okay with that given the seriousness of this topic. As a Cathaoirleach who is extremely passionate about this topic, I will close by saying the decisions taken by the companies represented by the witnesses over the next few years will shape our children and our society. Please do continue to keep this at the forefront of all decisions and ahead of profit at every possible juncture.