The dangers and consequences of the online world

As I write this, my Fianna Fáil colleagues in the Seanad are bringing forward a motion to debate Online Safety. I don’t doubt their good intentions, but the text of their motion is too deferential towards the Government, the EU and Big Tech.

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping our world, they say, and the Government has a plan called Digital Ireland that wants to make Ireland a “global hub for AI innovation”.

The motion reassures us that Ireland has a ‘robust online safety framework’, and that the EU and Coimisiún na Meán have “ended the era of self-regulation by big tech platforms”.

Pull the other one. Isn’t it still easier for a child to access pornography online than to buy a pair of shoes? (You need a credit card to buy the shoes.) And when it comes to controlling AI, well what? The motion wants Ireland to use its forthcoming EU Presidency to prioritise the protection of women and children “from the misuse of digital tools”. But my colleagues speak only of prohibiting the generation of intimate abuse images (not pornographic images generally).

Rules

The motion seems to want only EU-made rules. Of course, there are voices, such as Digital Rights Ireland, that agree and claim that Ireland doesn’t have the authority to make its own laws to protect its citizens. TJ McIntyre of DRI told Morning Ireland last week that attempts by the Government to restrict social media access to over-16s would breach EU harmonisation rules – “you can’t go further than EU law allows,” he says.

But here’s the thing about the EU and supra-national institutions. They cannot afford to be seen as blockers. When the public is riled up, and member state governments start stamping their feet about some restriction or other, a way can often be found, it seems. We see this at the moment with the move by 27 states of the 46-member Council of Europe (including Ireland) to get the European Court of Human Rights to change tack on immigration. This started with an initial ‘open letter’ to the Court by Denmark, Italy and seven other countries who didn’t like being told that they couldn’t deport criminal foreign nationals on ‘human rights’ grounds. In theory, governments shouldn’t be telling the courts how to interpret international law. In practice, the Court knows that a way must be found.

And the same will be true with the EU if member states insist on enhanced laws in their jurisdictions to protect children. Countries like Italy and France have already come out from behind the skirts of the EU and introduced strict age verification laws around pornography.

Enabling children to access pornography online needs to be seen as a form of child abuse in itself, and the law should reflect that”

In France, sites that do not comply with the age verification measures could also be criminally charged with sexual conduct against minors, which is punishable by up to three years in prison and a €75,000 fine.

And that’s the key idea. Enabling children to access pornography online needs to be seen as a form of child abuse in itself, and the law should reflect that. Coimisiún na Meán in Ireland is still talking about getting online platforms to do ‘age assurance’ which, to my mind, falls far short of forcing online pornography providers, on pain of criminal sanction, to make sure children don’t access their material.

Motion

So here’s what the FF Seanad motion should include:

Any benefits for children in using social media are outweighed by the negative impact on their learning ability, mental health and general welfare caused by early and excessive exposure to online social media;

The facilitation of access to pornography for children is itself a form of child sexual exploitation and abuse;

Regulators are all very well but you need strict, enforceable laws, with civil and criminal liability for those who endanger children and other vulnerable persons in the online space.

We should prohibit the use of AI technology within the State for enabling, creating or distributing nude or pornographic imagery depicting any person real or imagined.

Any entity engaged in the provision of online services within the State that fails to take reasonable age verification measures to ensure that children under 18 are not exposed to pornographic imagery should be criminally liable. They should also face civil liability, i.e. be sue-able by those whom they have harmed.

The same age verification obligations should apply if platforms fail to ensure that children under 16 do not access their social media services.

The more heavy-handed the State becomes, the less room it leaves for the innovation it also claims to support”

But is our Government too attentive to the demands of big technology companies that have their headquarters in Ireland? And is it hiding behind the promise someday of a Digital Services Card – which will likely infringe upon personal rights – when it simply needs to put the onus on service providers to provide for age verification? Remember, the more heavy-handed the State becomes, the less room it leaves for the innovation it also claims to support.

Depression

The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, accuses Mark Zuckerberg and Meta of trying to play down the link between social media and the increase in mental health and depression problems among children, especially young girls. Testifying to the US Senate, Zuckerberg conceded that there might be a correlation between children’s access to social media and a decade-and-a-half old spike in mental health problems and decline in academic achievement. But “correlation is not causation”, he said.

Haidt believes he has proven otherwise, and that social media is the main cause of the problem. He points out, among other things, that the spike in harms experienced by young girls in particular occurred at the same time over a decade ago when smartphones came on the scene, complete with cameras, and whenever the high-speed internet access necessary for uploading and sharing videos came to different places, the harms went up simultaneously.

He would like to see children have much less access to smartphones and social media, so that they can concentrate on the inter-personal, developmental, negotiation and social bargaining skills that only real contact people can give. If you have hundreds of ‘friends’, i.e. as in the online world, you have very few real friends, he says.