Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Parents are trying to protect their children from an online world and becoming increasingly overwhelmed and anxious about it because their children are carrying around in their pockets probably the biggest threat they will face for many years, and that is just their phones. The Netflix show "Adolescence" brought this danger into stark relief. It showed an extreme case of the tragic consequences of toxic online content. For parents, what the show demonstrated perfectly was the helplessness they often feel. I do not know if the Minister watched "Adolescence" but it was a very tough show to watch, as a parent.

We think our children are safe when they are at home with us but the reality is we often have no idea what they are looking at online. Parents are doing their best and so are schools. In my constituency in Wicklow the It Takes a Village initiative was a huge success. As part of that, all eight local primary schools introduced a voluntary no smartphone code. Under the scheme, parents signed up to not giving their children a smartphone until they went to secondary school. I know other schools around the country are doing similar. Mobile phone bans in both primary and secondary schools are now pretty widespread. I do not know of any school that is not throwing everything at this problem because schools know how serious it is. The difficulty is that toxic content is still there when children go outside the school gate and turn their phones on. That is where we need to protect them.

One study has found it took just two minutes from setting up an account for teenage boys to be fed harmful content. The content was misogynistic, violent, extremist and racist. Within two hours and 32 minutes of setting up that account, nearly 80% of the content being recommended was harmful. The dangerous content is endless and relentless and is being deliberately funnelled into children's accounts on a doom loop. Social media companies are making billions from feeding our children this toxic material and we as legislators are standing by and allowing it to happen.

A new report from the Children's Rights Alliance has warned about a lack of regulation online. I want to deal with one specific aspect of that report, namely, the lack of regulation of recommender algorithms. These are the algorithms that continually feed this toxic material to children in this dangerous online bubble. There is no escape from this endless scrolling of harmful and toxic content in it. Initially, Coimisiún na Meán had included measures to address these poisonous algorithms in the online safety code. This was really welcomed at the time but for some reason those proposals were removed. According to the Children's Rights Alliance, this was a big mistake and their removal reduces safety for children online. Does the Minister agree that these algorithms should be turned off? Does she think it was a mistake for Coimisiún na Meán to remove this regulation from the online safety code?

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