Social media companies based in Ireland have declined to support a push by the Department of Education to encourage parents not to buy smartphones for their primary school age children, according to the Minister for Education Norma Foley.
They have also declined to consider the introduction of more robust age verification measures to help ensure that children under the age of 13 are not accessing content on their phones, Ms Foley said.
Social media companies as well as telecommunications companies met the Minister this morning for what Ms Foley described as a “very robust” engagement.
Norma Foley said she raised these two central topics with the companies. She said she sought an undertaking that they would facilitate age verification but “that wasn’t forthcoming at present”.
She said she looked for their willingness to support parents who decide to hold off on purchasing a smartphone for their child, but this too “was not forthcoming”.
Ms Foley said the companies said that this was the prerogative of parents.
She said the companies had agreed to further engagement on both issues.
The companies in attendance included Meta which owns Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, Tik Tok, Google, telecommunications companies including 3 Ireland, Vodafone and Tesco, as well as the employer’s organisation IBEC. X was invited but did not attend.
On age verification, she said that there are children much younger than 13 accessing the platforms and that service providers should have robust mechanisms in place to ensure that is the case.
On age verification the minister said: “I’m not prescriptive on the mechanism they might use. I’m very happy for them to come up with a particular type of mechanism, but we must ensure that young people are not accessing content that we know is harmful to them, there are instances of cyber bullying and there are so many ramifications for young people.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s News At One she said if age verification could not be fulfilled then she believed that young people were being failed.
