Written answer
Social Media
Ireland is prioritising EU KIDS Act negotiations to protect minors from harmful recommender systems, alongside existing Digital Services Act oversight and investigations.
138. Deputy Sinéad Gibney asked the Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport to provide an update on his Department's plans to ensure a more proactive approach to online safety, particularly regarding the use of recommender systems and their impact on social media users. [74391/26]
Comment on this
It is a Government priority to ensure a robust framework for online safety, in particular for children and young people.
The recent Proposal for a new EU KIDS Act includes new provisions on recommender systems that are specifically designed to protect minors. For example, social media services will have to prioritise the clearly expressed preferences of children instead of implicit ones that are inferred from the behaviour of a child online. Personalisation based on tracking must be off by default. Social media will have to prominently display tools that enable minors to modify or control elements of a recommender system, including making it easy to delete previous preferences. At least one option of a system not based on profiling must be easily available. There are also measures to avoid the “rabbit hole” effect of recommending similar content repeatedly, where the cumulative effect can be harmful.
The EU KIDS Act has other provisions intended to make safer the overall design of social media and other digital services available to minors. These include provisions addressing addictive design, such as infinite scroll, and safeguards against contact from strangers.
As online safety, especially for children and young people, is a key theme of Ireland’s EU Presidency, we are giving priority to the negotiations on the EU KIDS Act and those discussions are advancing.
Of course, online safety is a concern for all ages. The Online Safety Framework, which includes the EU Digital Services Act, has provisions on the transparency of recommender systems and obligations on Very Large Online Platforms to assess and mitigate risks associated with those systems. There are investigations underway into compliance with those provisions and the European Commission issued preliminary findings against TikTok and Meta earlier this year.