2026-01-22

I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022 to regulate the use of recommender algorithms by video-sharing platform services. I am delighted to introduce what, I think, is a very important Bill, the Online Safety (Recommender Algorithms) Bill 2026. The Bill is very simple; it bans big tech companies from targeting children with toxic algorithms and turns them off by default for those over 18. This implements the unanimous all-party recommendation of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence, of which I am a member, in its first report published before Christmas. It also implements the original recommendation of Coimisiún na Meán in its draft online safety code to turn off social media algorithms by default before lobbying by big tech got that removed. Government Ministers have also previously said they support this. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, told the Dáil last year that she fully agreed that algorithms need to be switched off. Public opinion definitely strongly supports this. An Ireland Thinks opinion poll last September found that 68% of people want these toxic algorithms turned off. The urgency around forcing big tech to turn off its toxic algorithms has become even clearer in recent weeks. Elon Musk, the almost trillionaire owner of X and Grok, has turned Twitter into a machine for the mass production of child sexual abuse imagery and image-based sexual abuse of women. It is not just X. TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram - all of them - are pushing toxic content at children and adults every single second of the day. Their sole purpose in doing so is to maximise their profit. They know that extreme content keeps people watching longer. The longer the eyes are on the screens, the more ads they can see and the more money that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg can make. For girls, they recommend content promoting self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. Research in 2022 estimated that Meta makes over a quarter of a billion euro a year from pro-eating disorder accounts and related advertising on Instagram, most of which is targeted at young girls. For boys, it pushes anti-feminist manosphere content from misogynistic abusers like Andrew Tate. Numerous studies have shown how quickly this pushing happens. A study by Dublin City University, DCU, in 2024 showed how blank social media accounts identified as belonging to 16- and 18-year-old males were fed masculinist, anti-feminist and other extremist content between two and 23 minutes of being set up. Within two to three hours of viewing, three quarters of the content recommended by the algorithm was toxic. The media are now reporting how so-called artificial intelligence, AI, girlfriend apps and websites are being pushed to teenage boys across all major social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X. "AI girlfriend" is a misleading term for apps with taglines like "Build your own AI slut", which incite boys to create sexual abuse imagery by suggesting they can upload real photos of people they know. Within minutes, the app can create extreme, degrading, deepfake pornography of girls in their class in school. Is the Government going to continue to stand over big tech companies profiting from a depraved race to the bottom? The Taoiseach has been one of big tech's biggest boosters, regurgitating their public relations, PR, line on repeat that AI is the fourth industrial revolution on par with mechanisation and the printing press. The Government is tearing up planning laws, breaking its own legally binding climate laws and sacrificing electricity desperately needed for housing and public transport, all so that big tech can build even more data centres to store all the data where the algorithms operate and train their AI. Are they going to continue to sell our souls to big tech? The Tánaiste recently said that some things are more important than money. Now it is time for the Government to show it actually believes that, to take action, to agree with us and to turn off the toxic algorithms that direct our children to this horrific material. We need to do this urgently, not just to protect children but to protect the mental health of adults being bombarded with horrible, toxic content on a daily basis. The big tech companies know that hardly anyone would choose to see this stuff given the choice. That is why they lobbied Coimisiún na Meán so hard to get rid of the recommendation to turn off these recommender algorithms by default. We have to turn off this toxic torrent at the source - the big tech companies and the billionaire psychopaths who own them - rather than continuing to put all the responsibility on individual users and on parents, who are completely overwhelmed. Ms Niamh McDonald from the Hope and Courage Collective, an expert in this area who spoke at our press conference this morning, argued correctly that we must treat big tech just like big tobacco. It is the big tobacco of our day and we must take action now to prevent even more widespread harm. I hope all parties across the Dáil will support the Bill.

I thank Deputy Murphy. Is the Bill opposed?

It is not opposed.

Since this is a Private Members' Bill, Second Stage must, under Standing Orders, be taken in Private Members' time.

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."