Paul Murphy: Calls to Turn Off Social Media Algorithms to Protect Children

What we have a choice in this debate about and a choice in the vote tonight is about whether the profits of social media companies are going to come first or are we going to put the health and safety of children at first. That's the choice. Neil Martin, the Taoiseach himself, said that the damage caused to young people by social media is the public health challenge of our time. Minister McEntee previously asked if we should turn off the algorithm and said yes, we should turn off the algorithm. Simon Harris-Tonishta said that some things are more important than money, speaking about the need to regulate big tech in the context of the revelations about the mass production of child sexual abuse imagery and sexual abuse imagery of women by these corporations for profit. Big words, great. But now we have a bill which implements the recommendation of the AI committee. It implements it to the letter, what the AI committee is calling for. We have a bill that recommends what is called for by the Irish Council for civil liberties, by National Women's Council, National Youth Council, by all of the experts who have looked at this area, which is to turn off the toxic social media algorithms that are force-feeding toxic content at our young people. And what does the government say? The government and their amendment declines to give the bill a second reading on the grounds that the issues the bill seeks to address are already being addressed by Commission Neumann through its implementation of Ireland's online safety framework. You don't quite have the neck to just vote it down, because you know this is popular, you know it has been supported by backbench TDs. Brendan Smith has explicitly called for this about a year and a half ago, the measure contained in this bill, it will be interesting to see how he votes tonight. So instead you try to pretend to people that we are dealing with this issue, you are not dealing with this issue, and the reason we know you are not dealing with this issue is because the online safety code, which you are referring to, explicitly was amended to take this out. This was in the first draft, which was precisely what is contained in this bill, which I want to explain in a minute, and that was amended out. Why? Because Big Tech lobbied. Because Big Tech lobbied and said, actually, do you know what, the algorithms are great. They actually protect people and that is why we need to keep them, and so then Commission Neumann changed it and took it out. So big tech lobbying won out over the safety of our children. This is the bill that will deal with, or significantly deal with, the issue of toxic content. As I said, it is precisely what all the relevant expert groups are calling for. To explain what the effect of the bill would be, it is to turn off the recommender algorithm systems for anyone under 18, and turn them off by default for those over 18. So adults can choose to opt in, if the algorithm is explained in a transparent way, you explain what you are signing up for, and you can choose to opt in, but it is turned off permanently for under 18s until they reach the age of 18. This would have the effect of turning social media back to what it was supposed to be, what it was sold to us all about, as being a space whereby we can connect with our friends, build communities and so on, as opposed to, precisely as Michael Martin says, a thing that is creating a major public health challenge. A huge mental health crisis amongst young people in particular, but in society at large driving a process of alienation, all for profit of these major social media companies. Let us be clear, this is why the government is opposing a measure to protect the health and safety of children. It is because these are huge, powerful corporations who have massive political sway, and by which the government is effectively captured. The amount of money we are talking about in 2023, Meta generated over $134 billion in revenue, advertising revenue was $132 billion of that. The parent company of TikTok, $120 billion in revenue in 2023. YouTube, global advertising revenue, $31.5 billion in 2023. And the way these companies maximise their profit, and let us be clear, that is what they are interested in doing, they are not interested in creating safe spaces for young people, they are not interested in creating safe spaces for women, they are not interested in creating safe spaces for LGBTQ people, they are interested in maximising the amount of time that eyeballs are on the screen, so they can maximise the amount of advertising that they can sell. That is what they are interested in. And their algorithms are simply designed to do that. And the consequence is literally the force feeding of toxic content to young people. I will give you an example. There is a study done by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate called YouTube's Anorexia Algorithm, how YouTube recommends eating disorder videos to young girls. The study looked at what videos YouTube recommends to a 13-year-old Irish girl, who first watches one video about eating disorders. She then gets a thousand YouTube video recommendations. Two in three of those videos that she is then fed over the next couple of hours or whatever, relate to eating disorders or weight loss. One in three of those videos are videos advocating harmful eating disorders. One in 20 of those videos involve the promotion of self-harm or suicide content. Why are they doing that? Well, because Meta derives an estimated $2 million a year in revenue, directly from a pro-eating disorder bubble on Instagram alone, and $230 million from all those who follow this bubble. That revenue includes that derived from underage users. That is from Fair Play for Kids Designing for Disorder, Instagram's pro-eating disorder bubble 2022. There was another study done at DCU called recommending toxicity, the role of algorithmic recommender functions on YouTube shorts and TikTok in promoting male supremacist influencers. The study set up ten blank male-identified accounts. You go into a shop, you buy a blank phone, you buy a new phone, and you say you are a young man between 16 and 18 year old. Of all the male, all of the male-identified accounts were fed masculinist, anti-feminist, and other extremist content within 23 minutes on YouTube. Some of these accounts, and to be clear, these didn't watch anything. They didn't choose to opt in for any of this stuff. They didn't even watch the one video which is referenced in the study in terms of anorexia and pro-eating disorder content being fed to young women. They didn't seek it out at all, and one of the accounts was fed this toxic misogyny within two minutes. Incredible. Since then, we have the development of so-called AI girlfriend apps, which is a thoroughly misleading term for apps with taglines like, quote, build your own AI slut, incite boys to create child sexual abuse imagery by suggesting that they upload real photos of people they know from their school or wherever. And within minutes, the app can then create extreme, degrading, deepfake pornography of girls in their class in school. To go back to the study from DCU, by two to three hours viewing, the vast majority of the content being recommended was toxic. 76% in TikTok, YouTube Shorts 78%. By far the most prevalent of these was Andrew Tate. The other toxic categories were reactionary writing conspiracy, which accounted for 13.6% of recommended content on TikTok and 5.2% of recommended content on YouTube Shorts. Much of this was anti-transgender content. The reports recommended, quote, turning off recommender algorithms by default. The professor who was involved in the study said, the social media companies must come under increased pressure from the government to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of young people over profit. This is precisely the choice. To mention, I saw that Ken O'Flynn from Independent Ireland was opposing this bill, taking the side of the big tech companies over children, on the spurious grounds that he is opposed to censorship. To be clear, there is no iota, none whatsoever, of censorship involved in this. This bill would have no impact on the ability of people to create whatever content that they want and to put it on social media. What this bill simply does is to prevent and stop the force feeding of this toxic material to young people, and enables the rest of us to opt out of it or choose not to opt in to have this force fed to us. This is simple. It really is. Niamh MacDonald from the Hope and Courage Collective made the point at a press conference we had that we need to treat big tech as the big tobacco of our day. We need to take action now to prevent even more widespread harms. We have to turn off the toxic torrent of content at its source. Big tech companies, the billionaire psychopaths who own them, instead of the government's approach, and that is what they are pointing to in referencing the online safety code, of putting all the responsibility on individual users and on parents who are completely overwhelmed by all of this. I am appealing to the government at this stage to withdraw your amendment and pass the bill. If you have detailed points to make, fine, let us do that in committee, but let us take the side of children, their safety, their health, and not the side of the profits of big tech companies.