Advocates of internet safety and child protection will gather in Dublin later this week for a conference on online safety, against the backdrop of a landmark settlement involving Meta last month.
The Department of Culture, Communications and Sport is hosting conference, titled Online Safety for Children and Young People, as part of Ireland’s six-month EU presidential tenure.
The conference on Thursday and Friday is billed as bringing together policymakers, industry, and representative organisations to discuss the topic of online safety.
It comes as child safety advocates and legislators are watching with bated breath to see what implications a US settlement involving Meta will have for Europe.
The settlement reached last month sees an $18bn payout from Meta, which has also pledged to implement a series of changes to Facebook and Instagram following a lawsuit brought by 29 US states against the social media tech giant. The states had accused Meta of designing products that contributed to youth addiction and harmed mental health.
While Meta has denied any wrongdoing, the company will impose measures including limits on usage time, restrictions on notifications, stronger age-verification tools, the option of non-algorithmic feeds and hiding “likes” and similar engagement metrics for younger users.
For now, the measures are limited to the 29 US states that brought the lawsuit. But the ink was barely dry on the settlement when other parts of the world looked to the case with hope that the measures to be implemented by Meta will be rolled out outside the 29 states.
For example, Europe and South Korea have both addressed the issue, with the Korean Media and Communications Commission saying that it would like the Meta measures being implemented in the US states to be applied across the world.
In Europe, the Commission has engaged with the company since the settlement announcement — and just weeks after it found Meta to have been in breach of its Digital Services Act and ordered it to propose ways to make its social media platforms safer for children.
European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said: “Meta knows what we are expecting from them. Now it is for the company to offer these commitments in the European Union to protect our kids here too.”
Just last Thursday, Tánaiste Simon Harris said it was his view that the Meta case should “compel all social media companies to immediately adopt new child protection measures across all platforms and in all jurisdictions.”
August has been a momentous month in the battle to limit negative effects of social media on children.
At the start of the month, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico court to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts from the social media giant’s platforms – Facebook and Instagram. New Mexico took the case against Meta, claiming its platforms to be a “public nuisance” claiming its platforms are a “public nuisance” for not protecting children from online predators. During the first leg of the case, the company was ordered in March to pay $375m. The August ruling brought the total liability to $942m.
It also sought measures from Meta, including implementing more rigorous age verification for New Mexico users, such as additional measures to accurately identify the age of users within the limits of federal law. It will also be required to enhance protections against sextortion and child sexual exploitation, including stronger safeguards for minors and tougher enforcement against offending adult accounts. Meanwhile, push notifications for users under 18 during overnight hours are to be eliminated.
Meta has signalled its intention to appeal the New Mexico rulings. However, New Mexico authorities have warned that they plan to file a separate lawsuit against Meta this month.
Meanwhile, TikTok reached a $400m settlement with the US Department of Justice, after a 2024 lawsuit alleged the company violated federal children’s privacy laws. In July, the European Commission also sent TikTok preliminary findings indicating that TikTok accounts of minors do not meet the safety standards required under the Digital Services Act.
The focus on social media companies comes as the Children’s Rights Alliance is planning to conduct research on how children’s online safety is impacted by the right to privacy.
In July, the European Council extended a temporary measure until April 3 next year, allowing technology companies to detect and remove child sexual abuse material in private, non-encrypted communications.
Such checks can be carried out without the companies risking penalties for breaches of EU data protection rules. However, the current regime does not apply to end-to-end encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal.
The temporary measure had lapsed in April, and was extended in July until next April while EU institutions continue to negotiate a permanent system which would meet the concerns around the protection of children online while also not breaching data protection rules.
In welcoming the landmark Meta settlement, Noeline Blackwell, Online Safety Coordinator at the Children’s Rights Alliance, said: “The settlement is the next instalment in a blockbuster series of lawsuits being levelled against big tech and social media companies by US states. These are significant for those of us campaigning in Ireland and across Europe for a safer online world for children and young people.
“This multi-billion-dollar settlement shows that when governments prioritise public good and public health to challenge the might of big business, they have the power to win. This speedy settlement in the early days of the case suggests that the financial and reputational risk and cost of settlement is now less than the risks of continuing the harmful practices it has agreed to change.”
She said the ruling “should lead to greater review in Europe and elsewhere and, to a greater focus on the systems and content of platforms as products that should be safe to use, as is the standard for most other European products”.
This week’s conference comes against a backdrop of an expected European-wide social media ban for teenagers being introduced. However, there is no date for such a move, although it has been speculated in recent weeks that it could be mentioned in a “State of the Union” address from Ursula von der Leyen on September 16.
During a visit to Dublin in early August, France’s high commissioner for children, Sarah El Haïry, urged Ireland to use its presidency to press ahead with such a ban for teenagers by the end of the year. France has banned access to social media for children under the age of 15.
Ireland has cited the protection of children online as a priority for its presidential term, with both Taoiseach Micheál Martin and EU commissioner Michael McGrath believing that a European bloc-wide approach would be the best step rather than individual countries implementing their own measures.
Meanwhile, in Britain, teenagers between 16 and 18 years old will be encouraged from next spring to have a social media curfew between midnight and 6am. However, there will be an opt-out available to teens in their account settings – although the default setting will be that some apps will be blocked under the proposed curfew. An under-16 social media ban was also announced in the UK during the summer.
In Australia, where a social media ban came into play for under-16s in December, just over a quarter of children between the ages of 13 and 15 were on TikTok last month, according to parental control software maker Qustodio.
A three-month review of the measures was undertaken by the Australian government in March, with a report on it published last month which noted that the proportion of under-16s holding at least one social media account fell from 52.4% to 42.3% at the three-month follow-up.
While media commentary focused on the fact that under-16s were still accessing social media, chief executive of the Irish Internet Hotline, Mick Moran, said: “To say the Australian measure is not working is an easy soundbite and an easy thing for the people against it to say. It is actually working perfectly well for some.”
He said that the Meta settlement is welcome and is a row-back against what is known as the “enshittification” or platform decay of online services and products, including social media.
He added: “We have seen ‘enshittification’ (described as the gradual breakdown in quality and usefulness of online platforms) coming for years, but what we are seeing now is that people are starting to kick back against it – health authorities are saying there are genuine health concerns here. We have politicians finally sitting up and taking notice. But the bigger picture is that trust and safety is hitting the bottom line.
“Once people start to kick back against it, enshittification has reached its limits. How far it can be pushed back remains to be seen.”
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