Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for providing us with time to discuss what is without question one of the most pressing issues we face in an increasingly digitalised world. We all live our lives online. It is where we work, shop, find our entertainment and, increasingly, where we socialise and young people find their communities. Many young people almost have a parallel online life to their life in the real world. I had the pleasure of attending the South Dublin Comhairle na nÓg annual youth conference recently. Comhairle na nÓg had conducted a survey among young people which highlighted that managing their social media and mental health are two of the biggest issues impacting on them. It launched a campaign to encourage young people to take time off from being online, use social media safely, explore other interests and, very importantly, see their friends in real life.

Mental health and social media are intrinsically linked, as study after study tells us. Social media, and the online world more generally, are where we are most often confronted by material and behaviour that is harmful, dangerous or downright illegal. It is where algorithms, addictive by design, reward division and hate, promote the most harmful content and prey on our children’s attention for profit.

An upshot of how embedded the online world has become in our daily lives is that the owners of the platforms we use every day - Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok - have an influence over us that no private corporations should have. They control what we see, how we interact with each other online and how we view ourselves and others. This is, without doubt, having an impact on the well-being of young people.

There is a moral imperative on any government to stand up to the tech giants and ensure they do what is needed to keep us all safe online and, in particular, keep our children safe. Ireland, as the home to many of these online power holders, holds a particularly important position. We can and must be global leaders in online safety, setting a course for others to follow. Working with our friends and colleagues in Europe, we can and must play a vital role in crafting an online world that puts safety before the profits or the protests of tech barons. The Elon Musks of this world can never be allowed to dictate how we keep our citizens or our children safe online.

It is welcome that the Government appears to be taking this seriously. The Online Safety and Media Regulation Act was an important step forward and the work of Coimisiún na Meán and the Online Safety Commissioner in implementing those regulations, along with the corresponding EU legislation, is vital. Of course, this is a fast-moving area, where the issues and threats we face develop and shift from month to month, never mind from year to year. We only need to look at the rapid development of Al chatbots in the three years since the enactment of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act to make clear just how quickly developments are happening.

We cannot rest on our laurels. We need to be agile and respond to new issues and threats as they arise. Across Ireland and the world, parents are calling for clearer and stronger action to keep children safe online. They are not calling for perfection or censorship. They are calling for basic, enforceable safeguards to protect their children from exploitation, bullying and exposure to harmful content.

Last month, every parent in this country watched in horror a "RTÉ Investigates" report into Roblox, one of the most popular gaming platforms used by primary school children. What that programme revealed is nothing short of alarming. A senior garda from the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau, Detective Superintendent Michael Mullen, warned that children are being groomed and exploited on online gaming platforms at "an alarming scale".

He spoke of grooming, sexual exploitation, and abuse not as an occasional occurrence but as something that happens every day.

To understand what children are experiencing, the "RTÉ Investigates" team set up accounts as if they were a five-year-old, a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old. At no point were they asked for age verification. At no point were they prompted to enable parental controls. Once inside the platform, they encountered, in experiences rated as suitable for children, sexualised role-play, simulated sexual acts, racial slurs and discussions of suicide. This was not hidden, deep-web material. This was found within roughly 12 hours of normal game play on a platform used by over 150 million people daily, one third of whom are under 13. The investigation also identified gambling-style mechanics available to under-13s, as well as children begging strangers for the platform's currency, something gardaí say has already been exploited by predators to coerce children here into harmful behaviour, including self-harm and attempted suicide.

Irish children are being groomed on these platforms and one of the greatest risks is the ease with which adults and children can communicate freely and then be moved off-platform into private messaging services, where there is no oversight at all.

These issues extend far beyond Roblox. Across the social media landscape, we are witnessing a deeply troubling rise in algorithm-driven harm. Research shows that social media algorithms, including TikTok's, can funnel boys towards misogynistic and extremist content within minutes of first using the app. What begins as possibly a harmless interest in fitness, gaming, motivational videos, etc., can quickly become exposure to violent, demeaning, and hyper-aggressive content that normalises misogyny and peddles distorted ideas of masculinity. Teachers are reporting misogynistic attitudes in classrooms and playgrounds that are being reinforced by what boys are being pushed to watch online. We are dealing not only with harmful content but a system designed to amplify whatever keeps users engaged, regardless of its impact on well-being or safety. This is not about opposing technology or technological progress. It is about recognising the scale of the challenge, the pace of the dangers coming towards us and the responsibility we have, collectively, to act.

We can all see the effects of addictive recommender algorithms that target and manipulate children in particular, turning their curiosity and attention into a commodity to be milked for profit. We see the devastating effects of cyberbullying and online harassment, we see children encountering damaging material online, whether that is violent content, pornographic content or hateful content, and we see the proliferation of the disinformation and manipulation that is plaguing democracies right across the world. We are increasingly seeing that in our own country - in our own democracy.

There are no easy answers here. The only answer is to look towards best practice and the evidence to come up with evolving solutions to respond to the changing threats of the day. The Government's announcement this week of the piloting of an age verification system through a digital wallet is worthy of consideration and it shows a government that is interested and active in getting this right. We welcome that but we must be crystal clear that any solution here, whether based on age verification or otherwise, must be effective, workable and safe. That means people's right to privacy must be protected and solutions must respect existing data protection laws. It also means it must do what it sets out to do, and provide an effective way of keeping children away from harmful content in a workable and enforceable manner. We all will be watching Australia closely in that regard.

These are big challenges, and we should be looking across the world for evidence and best practice examples in terms of the solutions other countries are putting in place. At EU level, we must work with other like-minded member states to resist any and all efforts to water down our existing online safety regulations. We are already seeing, with the Commission's so-called Digital Omnibus, a move towards deregulation that risks rolling back the progress that has been made so far. Data protection rights, for example, seem to be in the firing line. These are hard won protections and they are in place for good reason. We should be clear in standing up for what has been achieved so far.

I will touch also on the issue of online harassment and abuse. As public figures, so to speak, some of us will have been targeted online. It has got exponentially worse over the past number of years. We must never accept a situation where public representatives going about their work to serve their communities are put at risk or where people, particularly women and minorities, are afraid to put their head above the parapet and engage in public life for fear of what might come their way online.

Torrents of abuse, targeted harassment and even threats are the daily reality for women and minorities, in particular, who are brave enough to engage in public life. Criticism, of course, is valid and debate is welcome. Disagreement is a necessary part of our political processes but intimidation and harassment achieve nothing except to push good people away from engaging in the process at all. Ultimately, it is our democracy itself that suffers and that is something that should deeply worry all of us in this House. We need to see real action from online platforms in tackling this kind of abuse and harassment and action from the regulator ensuring they do so. Standards have been allowed to slip for too long. We cannot allow algorithms which reward abusive content to continue to feed a culture of intimidation online.

There has been some good progress in the area of online safety in recent years - progress that we as a country can be justifiably proud of - but in a fast moving online world, it is clear that standing still is not an option. Whether it is in keeping our kids safe online or protecting our public sphere from the effects of abuse and intimidation, we need to see an active State that looks at the evidence and puts in place workable, effective solutions.

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