Kylen McDonald (14) cannot remember ever not having access to a device. Like plenty of other boys in his class, he got a phone when he was around eight years old. But he had access to an iPad even before that, and was already playing Roblox.
Kylen, who is from Virginia in Co Cavan, is one of the thousands of teenagers who could potentially lose access to the most popular functions on their smartphone overnight, if the Irish Government manages to persuade the European Union to impose an age limit of 16 for social media. Kylen does favour restrictions to make algorithms more age appropriate, but isn’t sure about an outright ban. “I think a lot of kids have become a bit attached to their phones. So a full ban, that would affect them.”
He’s a little bit bemused by the concern of adults. “The way my parents are about it, they make it seem like it’s the end of the world if I see one, like, extreme video. But I’ve been online for so long, they’re a bit late with it. I’ve seen a bunch of stuff. I’m kind of desensitised to it.”
Most of Kylen’s algorithm revolves around games like Roblox, but he’s become acclimatised to the extreme content that seems to stray into his feed with alarming regularity.
He explains there are “bypasses” on TikTok, where people use filters to get pornography on to the app “disguised as a normal game”. “It shows you something normal, and then you click on it and it switches into porn,” he says.
“If I see an extreme video, you know, you get curious. You watch it, and it registers as interest in it. But you’re just shocked that it’s on your page.” Then there’s the Andrew Tate stuff, and Kyle explains that “nobody wants to be seeing that”. “I wouldn’t say it’s everywhere, but you definitely do see it,” he says.
Darah Kavanagh (16), from Tallaght in Dublin, has had a phone since he was around 10 years old – and that felt late to him. He’s worried about extreme content that’s “always circulating, but somehow it always finds its way to people that are in some way lost.
“I’ve gotten a lot of good out of social media. But then, of course, I’ve also been exposed to a lot of bad things.”
Darah explains how content creators are using “outlandish statements, something that they know quite well is going to be very hurtful, to try and earn views, followers, subscribers”.
Both Kylen and Darah explain how there’s a big attention economy built around TikTok creators who host live debates on controversial, provocative and antagonistic topics for entertainment. And the extreme views start to filter through to their offline world.
Kylen remembers, at his former school, “the amount of kids I saw doing the Hitler salute”. “Just as a joke – they don’t mean it, but they do it, desensitising the meaning of it.”
Kylen and Darah recently participated in a workshop with 23 other teenagers through youth service providers Foróige and Crosscare, organised by Fianna Fáil, which found that the average age the group first started using some sort of device was six, with some of them being as young as four. The average age at which they got a smartphone was about seven or eight. The teenagers had all witnessed violent, extreme, racist, sexist and unhealthy body image content online. But, while all of them wanted more moderation of social media, they opposed a blanket ban for under-16s.
This year, the Irish Government will use its presidency of the EU to lobby for support for age limits on social media – similar to Australia’s ban for under-16s. With adults, the policy is popular. The teenagers think this is hypocritical. (“My mother is on her phone the whole time!” Kylen says.) Despite the fact the Government has yet to earn the support of the very people this policy will affect the most, it has already built a new online age verification tool that’s ready to be tested by the public.
Within the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) – which is the Government’s adviser on digital development. The staff at the OGCIO have built an app for a new digital wallet, which is an online ID that would be linked to a person’s PPS number. It would sit on your phone in the same way a bank card or a digital concert ticket does and, if age limits came into effect, you would need to use it to access some of the most popular social networks in the country.
The project has raised the heckles of everyone from respected privacy advocates to the most suspicious of conspiracy theorists. But the Government is confident that its app offers more privacy than other age verification methods. For a start, it’s publicly owned and publicly built – a concept called “digital sovereignty”. (This is unlike the UK’s new law setting age limits for pornography websites, which has outsourced age verification – and the personal data processing that requires – to private providers.) Neither does it require the State to trust social networks to implement age checks – and, most importantly to some within the Government, it does not require the public to give their personal information to a tech company.
The Irish Times has seen the app in action. The way the app will share your information with a social network like Instagram or TikTok, for the purpose of age verification, is based on a model called “zero knowledge proof”. This means the app can tell the social network that you are over the required age limit, without needing to send any evidence like your date of birth or other personal information. The social network basically asks the digital wallet app: is this person over 16? The app responds with the programming equivalent of a yes or a no, but does not share any of your personal information with the social network. The app is not run through a Government server. It does keep a log of the amount of times you’ve used it, but this data is held on your device only and the Government will have no access to that. It will not record and share information about your browsing history.
Jack Chambers, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, said the app “uses only the minimum data required for a transaction and always with the user’s consent. This is about building trust, improving outcomes, and ultimately delivering better public services for people”. The app’s design would enable someone operating an anonymous social media account to use it to verify their age, without having to reveal their name or identity to a platform. But away from the civil servants who have developed the app, and in the political arena of Leinster House, some on the Fine Gael side of the Government seem to be proposing that the app could be used to crack down on anonymous and abusive social media accounts.
Tánaiste Simon Harris was reported as saying that there is a broader issue beyond age verification with “anonymous bots”, while Fine Gael TD Grace Boland has also proposed using the app pilot to tackle an online world where “harm hides behind anonymity”.
A new age limit is one thing; a crackdown on online anonymity – which would attempt to change the complexion of the digital space – would be a different policy altogether. The public have yet to be fully consulted on how they feel about either.