I thank People Before Profit for bringing forward this Bill, which is both timely and essential and which I completely support. As a father of four children, social media is the biggest issue in the day-to-day running of most houses. The influence it has on homes is ridiculous. Children growing up in this time and age are suffering from mental health issues and eating disorders like we have never seen before and it is connected. If we go to a wedding or to any event, we will see children taking out their phones. They are addicted to them. They are on Snapchat snapping away every aspect of their lives. They are not living life anymore. We are living in a rapidly evolving digital landscape that could become complex and deeply unsettling. We are raising children online in this world where everything is constantly evolving at a pace that they cannot handle. Everything becomes normalised. Children dying in Gaza and pictures of murders on the streets can come up under algorithms all the time. We are stuck in this, constantly trying to battle it if our child is upset. We ask them what happened and they tell us this. Some of them are 15 or 16 years of age now and they have been dealing with this for years. This plays out in multiple houses throughout this country. There is going to be an epidemic of mental health issues regarding algorithms moving forward. We have a responsibility to try to debate this. I understand where we are all coming from. We are meant to be on the same page but if we are, we need to move on this. More worrying is researchers for a DCU study found that every male social media account that was studied found that within 23 minutes there was anti-fascist content and other extreme content on the phone. Whether they sort this out, this content is fed through their algorithms. It comes onto their phones and has a direct effect on males, especially those at third level college. They have been dealing with this for years. It is affecting the way they are growing up and the lack of maturity among certain cohorts who are influenced by these algorithms. I want to make this clear. We need to make social media companies accountable. If we do not, we are failing society. TikTok opened its European data centre in Dublin just over two years ago and the Dublin transparency and accountability centre, which was opened by TikTok ironically in 2024, appears to be nothing more than a PR stunt. There is a lack of algorithm transparency. Social media companies are making millions of euro off the misery of children in Ireland. That is a fact. In school, there are SPHE classes once a week. How is that going to fix anything? It is completely the wrong approach. It is not fair of us to expect them to consume so much negativity and not be affected by it. They are affected by it, and we are responsible. As a parent, I am responsible, and I take my responsibility, just like everybody else up and down the country. Right now, these companies are not helping us. They are failing us. As parents, we are struggling to deal with this.

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