The Century Of Selfie

Gen Free at Temple Carrig TUES17SEPT24

aving formed over the summer, Gen Free is a new Greystones group out to lobby all political parties to commit to implementing legislation to protect children online.

And last night, they launched their Free To Be Kids campaign.

Consisting primarily of Temple Carrig teacher Eoghan Cleary, CEO of Sybersafe Kids Alex Cooney, St Kevin’s NS PTA chair Phil Moyles, Portlaw National School principal Brian Barron and Psycholtherapist Richard Hogan, the group is putting out a call to action for all parents and school leaders in North Wicklow.

Eoghan Cleary

A call for mobile phone restrictions when it comes to primary school kids was heard around the world when another Greystones group keen to tackle malice in Wonderland, It Takes A Village, first suggested the move in 2023.

Having taken place at Temple Carrig School, Gen Free hosted It’s Time To Protect Our Children, with emcee for the night being Prof Matthew Sadlier, chair of the IMO Consultants Committee, whilst the panel was made up of Minister For Health Stephen Donnelly, CyberSafeKid’s Alex Cooney, psychotherapist Dr Joanna Fortune and Eoghan Cleary.

Here’s the lowdown from Gen Free, issued on Wednesday, September 18th 2024…

Hundreds of parents came together on Tuesday night in a secondary school sports hall in north Co. Wicklow to demand that government legislate to protect their children online.

The event, hosted by Temple Carrig Secondary School in Greystones, was the launch of the Gen Free: Free to be Kids campaign, which calls upon all political parties to include three basic asks in their manifestos for the upcoming general
election.

1) Regulation. Specific and effective legislation to protect children online.
2) Education. Smartphone free primary and secondary schools (until effective legislation is in place) and digital literacy to become a fourth pillar of the education system as well as the resourcing of online safety educational programs for parents.
3) Supports. A public awareness campaign aimed in particular at parents outlining the pitfalls of the online world and excessive screen time for children as well as wellbeing training and related support services for schools.

The Gen Free campaign launch was chaired by Prof. Matthew Sadlier, of the Irish Medical Organisation, who recently called for smartphone and social media usage by children to be treated as a public health emergency. Speaking before the event, Professor Sadlier simply stated that “each person gets only one chance at a childhood”.

He emphasised that “the radical changes in behaviour of children that we have seen since the introduction of immersive digital technology is having an overwhelming harmful effect”, and he called on government to regulate the technology companies responsible “to ensure that the only childhood each person gets is [one] free from unnecessary harms.”

Stephen Donnelly

The hundreds of people in attendance, made up mainly of local parents, educators and politicians, were first treated to a comprehensive and hard-hitting presentation on the impacts of social media use and exposure to the unregulated online world on young children and adolescents in terms of their physical, personal, social and sexual development.

It outlined what we now know about the damage excessive screen time does to the brain development of infants, the undeniable correlation between unregulated child and adolescent exposure to the online world and the growing youth mental health crisis, as well as the impact of early exposure to violent pornographic content both on the individual child and on a society that is grappling with increasing rates of sexual violence every year.

Dr Catherine Conlon, senior medical officer with the HSE, said in support of the Gen Free campaign: “Independence and friendship has been replaced by conversations with strangers and the persistent need to match up to unachievable standards. So, why are we surprised when we hear that adolescent mental health has plummeted? Robust age verification measures would take the very real pressure off parents to allow their kids access to social media, teens won’t feel excluded if everyone else is in the same boat.”

The presentation was followed by the panel discussion, with the Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, stating that “just asking online companies to do the right thing and remove harmful content isn’t enough. It’s why I’ve established the online health task force and asked them to develop responses to harms caused by certain types of online activity.”

He went on to reinforce the IMO claim, stating that “this is a public health crisis and I know as a government we have already responded with legislation, and I am determined that if further legislation is needed it will be forthcoming.”

Brian Barron, a Waterford primary school principal and founding member of the Gen Free campaign, was quick to emphasise that this campaign is more nuanced than simply banning smartphones.

“There are lots of positive aspects to the internet and the online world that improve our young people’s lives. We just need the government to force the creators of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the other sites our children use to take responsibility to make them safe for under 16s and under 18s.”

According to Barron, the ask is not that complicated; “the same protections that exist for under-18s in the real world need to be replicated in the online world.”

Phil Moyles, the chair of a local primary school parents’ association and fellow Gen Free campaign member, agrees. Referring to an article that appeared in The Irish Mail on Sunday this week, Moyles said, “we are delighted to see Taoiseach Simon Harris coming forward to acknowledge the harm and potential dangers of the online world for our young people.”

In the same article the Taoiseach referred to the powers of the Digital Services Act at a European Level to put in place “binding codes that make it clear what a social media company must abide by” but the truth is that so far the Digital Services Act seems to be acting more as an obstacle to protecting our children online than a comprehensive mechanism by which to do so; in practice, it actually limits the regulation that countries can apply through the online safety codes Harris refers to. However, there is still nothing in EU law to stop Ireland legislating to protect the welfare of its own children in the face of this public health crisis while we wait for Europe to catch up.

Alex Cooney, of CyberSafeKids, recently appointed to the newly established Online Health Taskforce but speaking on this occasion as a member of the Gen Free campaign, pointedly called on the technology companies responsible to foot the bill for the protections required to counter act the damage they are causing. “The internet was not designed with children in mind. It was designed by adults for adult use and we know that globally, children make-up a third of online users. Reports suggest that children are extremely lucrative users of online platforms. The
companies financially benefiting from children using their services must be the bodies tasked with financing and resourcing our proposals.

Regardless of what they say, the behaviour of tech companies has made it clear that they couldn’t care less about the wellbeing of our children. In fact they make money by ignoring it. Despite their own self-imposed age restriction of 13 years of age by the most popular social media platforms used by children, 82% of 8-12 year olds in Ireland have their own social media or instant messaging account (Left to the their own Devices, CyberSafeKids Annual Report 2024).

We do not need a reactionary-only regulatory process at EU level whereby countless children must first be harmed before the tech companies responsible are fined for their actions after years of convoluted court proceedings. Ireland has already led the charge in this regard fining Instagram over 400million euro for breaching laws on the protection of children’s data.

We have also fined Meta a record 1.2billion euro for similar GDPR violations. But they don’t care; these fines don’t even leave a mark. In 2022 alone the six most popular social media companies made more than €11billion from ad revenue targeted at children, €2 billion of this was from content targeted at children under 12 years of age (despite their supposed age restrictions). This is not a global figure, this is just how much they made in one year solely from the children of the United States.

We are way beyond trying to regulate the behaviour of these companies retrospectively; it does not protect our children and it does not make the internet any safer for anyone. What we need now is legislation to force these companies to create online spaces that are safe for children by default before, as Professor Sadlier pointed out last night, any child experiences harm that is unnecessary and avoidable.

It seems at least one of Gen Free’s asks has already been realized in Minister Donnelly’s reaffirmed commitment to a “€1 million fund to raise awareness” and “ equip parents and children with the knowledge” they require. The question is, “How do we ensure that the more challenging legislative asks are also enacted?”.

There’s no denying that over the last three years there has been a growing national realisation that our children are being harmed online. Eoghan Cleary has been giving talks to primary and secondary school parents since 2017 on the potential harmful effects of the online world and it is great to see a critical mass of academics, NGOs and parents becoming active in this space. But what we need now is for all parents, guardians, educators and community leaders nationwide to mandate the government to act. They need our backing if they are to stand up to the overwhelming power these tech giants wield.

Anne Longfield, at the end of her tenure as UK Commissioner for Children said, “I do think [children] will look back on this period and they will see it literally was a time where the digital world was a wild and dangerous place. I think they will wonder how adults ever let that happen.” In an interview with the BBC earlier this year, Stephen Donnelly echoed these sentiments saying, “We will look back at the last five or ten years, in time, with horror. I think we will look back and say it was the Wild West.”

It’s time to protect our children online.

If you are interested in leading the charge to mandate the government to protect children online in your own local community or school you can contact Gen Free on email here or you can follow our simple step-by-step guide to emailing your local government representatives on the issue here.