2. Deputy Sinéad Gibney asked the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport the steps An Coimisiún na Meán is taking to promote and enforce safety on social media and combat online harms, with particular regard to vulnerable groups such as children and vulnerable adults; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [64384/25]

Sentiment score: -0.15

Last week during Questions on Policy or Legislation, the Tánaiste mentioned that the Minister was preparing proposals around online safety to bring before the House and expected to introduce them by the end of the year. I am keen to hear about the details of that, in particular the role for Coimisiún na Meán and how people will be protected and whether those protections will extend beyond those under 16 years of age.

Sentiment score: 0.57

I thank the Minister. I have concerns. For a start, the focus being entirely on children and vulnerable people risks leaving behind the rest of the population. I am hearing more and more about age verification being a silver bullet to resolve everything. I have huge concerns about age verification, even if it is robust. It raises major privacy issues in that it would hand over official documentation to providers that have already proven that they do not respect our privacy. It has a cut-off point, which means that those who are not using age verification remain on a much darker Internet without those protections. We need algorithms turned off by default. The Minister referenced EU law and said that is the best place to deal with this, but even this week we have seen rollbacks on the GDPR and potential rollbacks on the AI Act. I am not comforted that the EU level of action around this is adequate. We have a specific role to play, given that so many tech companies are headquartered here.

Sentiment score: 0.15

I am not saying that age verification cannot be used. Rather, I am telling the Minister that if it is used, it raises privacy concerns. My point is that it is not fixing the actual problem at the root because all of that nasty material remains online. We need to have recommender systems turned off by default because they are the issue. They are the things keeping our eyeballs on screens and making sure polarisation is driving clickbait and profit lines. There are fundamental ways in which these tech platforms need to be challenged that I do not see demonstrated by the Government. We had an exchange in committee a number of months ago where the Minister mentioned that he had raised age verification with tech companies. When I asked him about this, we discussed raising the issue of platforms as publishers, for example, as a way to start examining much more stringent and clearer ways in which we can build guidelines and safety standards into the online world that mirror what we expect in the real world. That is what we are looking for in order to address these problems at the root.

Sentiment score: -0.01