Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of a survey carried out by the Royal Society for Public Health, which revealed that four of the five most popular forms of social media harm young people's mental health. Instagram has been pinpointed as the most damaging to young people's mental well-being.According to the survey of almost 1,500 people it is deepening young people's feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, depression, insomnia, loneliness and fear of missing out. The survey concluded that Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter are also harmful. Among the five, only YouTube was judged to have a positive impact and the other four platforms were deemed to have a negative effect. According to participants they can exacerbate the body image worries of children and young people and worsen bullying.

As legislators we must ensure social media firms take more responsibility for their users. Measures such as pop-up images to warn young people when they have been using the Internet a lot should be introduced. With Instagram and similar platforms, young girls in particular who are comparing themselves to unrealistic and digitally manipulated images should see a pop-up alert indicating that these photographs have been "photoshopped", along with other measures. In the next few weeks we will perhaps be trying to get legislation finished, but I ask the Leader that in the new term he would prioritise discussion on the effect of social media on our younger people.