In June, a group of sixth-class students from Claremorris National School in Co Mayo were visiting Leinster House when they bumped into Tánaiste Simon Harris.
The first question they asked him was what he was going to do about a social media ban.
“It was interesting to note the amount of them in favour of it,” Mr Harris told the Dáil the next day. “It gave me a real insight into the pressure young people are feeling.”
Despite all of the social good it can do, more people are coming around to the conclusion that unfettered access to the internet is posing great risks to the health and safety of children.
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Parents and schools in Ireland and elsewhere are working together to impose community-wide bans on smartphones until their children reach certain ages.
Research is demonstrating that children who have access to social media are presenting behaviours consistent with addiction to the internet.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing the risk of child abuse imagery and even more harmful and extreme content.
Gamified apps risk conditioning children to gambling. There are fears within the Department of Justice that pornographic content is warping children’s ideas of sex and may predispose boys to violent acts, including strangulation. Research shows happiness levels in Irish children are in decline.
On Wednesday Australia will become the first country in the world to impose a social media ban for children under 16.
[ Australia says world will follow social media ban as Meta starts blocking teensOpens in new window ]
Already, children are finding a way around it by migrating to new, lesser known apps that have not yet been included in the list of those banned for children.
One app even appeared to collaborate with young influencers on video-sharing app TikTok to promote “the new cool app we can all move to” in advance of the ban.
This week, social media company Meta started shutting down hundreds of thousands of Instagram and Facebook accounts suspected to be operated by under-16s in Australia.
The methods by which some social media giants are verifying the ages of their users are opaque, with platforms even claiming that sharing details of their process would allow teenagers to figure out how to evade it.
In Ireland, the digital age of consent is set at 16 under an EU regulation. The strong view within the Government is that children below this age should not have access to social media.
An online health taskforce within the Department of Health is considering whether 13 “is an appropriate age for children to have access to social media”.
Imposing an age limit on social media would require a robust means of proving that children are 16 or older. The Government does not believe it is possible to task social networks with the responsibility for verifying the ages of its users.
Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan said previously he thinks apps relying on children to self-declare their ages is “pointless”, believing that linking accounts to verified data, such as a Government ID, is the only effective way to prove someone’s age online.
This is why Mr O’Donovan, alongside Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers and Minister for Social Protection Dara Calleary, are working to design a digital wallet linked to MyGovID, the existing online identity that people use to access social welfare payments.
The Office of the Chief Information Officer, within Mr Chambers’s department, has been designing the wallet and talking to tech giants such as Google and Apple about its operability.
Countries such as Spain and Greece are trying to develop similar government-backed wallets of their own to keep children safer online.
The appeal of a digital wallet is that, unlike the Australian system, it would be a consistent and thorough way to prove someone’s age across all social media apps.
The Government would then not have to rely on social media companies, many of which have based their European headquarters in Dublin, to impose an age limit on users.
Technically this should suit the likes of Meta, which had complained that what it called the “poorly developed” Australian law would be better implemented if app stores were required to verify age.
Meta did not comment on the Irish Government’s plan to use a MyGovID wallet to age-verify users.
Any move to impose age limits on social media will not be popular with Facebook and Instagram, both of which are trying to demonstrate that they are being proactive on child safety and age verification.
Instagram recently took out a series of adverts in Irish media declaring that it “supports an EU Digital Majority Age requiring parental approval” before teenagers can have a social media account. But the opposition to the Government’s plan will not come from Big Tech alone.
The Government is now bracing for a privacy rights row, anticipating that some may raise data protection or civil liberty concerns about the use of MyGovID to verify age and identity online.
Speaking about the plan in the Dáil last month, Mr O’Donovan put it plainly: “It’s going to be a very difficult question, and a very salient question, for this House: What is more important? Privacy or the protection of children online?”
He invoked a previous controversy where concerns about data protection hampered Government efforts to compel people to use a Public Services Card for certain State services.
Mr O’Donovan said the law “floundered because some interest groups outside of the House, interested more in privacy than other issues, got their way”.
Discussing plans to set age limits for children on social media in the Dáil last month, Social Democrats TD Sinead Gibney told the minister that she had “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,” she said.
The Government wants to make online child safety one of the big themes of its presidency of the council of the EU next year. Mr O’Donovan has already lobbied to have child age verification included in the Government’s upcoming National Digital Strategy, due to be published before the end of this year. The Government feels that the most effective way to set age limits for social media would be at EU level.
Even though there is overwhelming support within Europe to limit the amount of access children have to social media, there is no consensus on how this should work and there is no broad support for an Australian-style ban.
While Ireland is one of nine EU countries to keep its digital age of consent at 16, more than half of member states have used the opportunity under EU data privacy regulations to lower their age of consent for personal data processing to 15, 14 and even 13 years of age.
There are already differing opinions emerging between member states on what a social media age limit should be. Many European politicians believe parents should retain the right to allow children under 16 to access social media.
While France has passed a law that says social media accounts should not be accessible to children under 15, parents have the discretion to give children under the age limit permission to open an account.
In October, a majority of MEPs supported a proposal to set an EU-wide digital minimum age of 16 for social media, which would still allow children aged 13 and over to have a social media account with parental consent.
Cynthia Ní Mhurchú, the Fianna Fáil MEP, said outright bans “may sound decisive, but strict bans alone rarely work and often prove counterproductive”.
“Children will find ways around them,” she said.
She favours robust age verification and better content moderation by social media giants.
“Children can learn a great deal from online resources,” said Ms Ní Mhurchú. “We need to strike a balance to ensure that this online space is a safe space where content is aggressively moderated and children can access age-appropriate content in a healthy way – with the full knowledge of their parents.”
