Big tech companies should be forced to turn off recommender algorithms which are feeding harmful content to young people, People Before Profit said at an event on Tuesday highlighting online harms.
The party has brought forward a draft bill which would ban the practice whereby companies like TikTok and YouTube feed further content to people who express an interest in a subject.
The draft bill would allow regulators to turn off recommender algorithms for children aged under 18 and ensure that only adult users could turn them on.
People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said the consequences of these algorithms for young people are “horrendous and driving an epidemic of mental health problems among young people”.
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He cited a study which showed a 13-year-old girl who clicks on a YouTube video relating to eating disorders will find that one-in-three recommended videos will be for harmful eating disorder content, two in three will relate to eating disorders or weight loss and one in 20 would be about self-harm.
In Dublin City University researchers set up fake accounts for male teenagers between the ages of 16 and 18. Within 23 minutes they were bombarded with masculinist, antifeminist and hateful material with videos by Andrew Tate featuring prominently.
Mr Murphy said the tech companies could not be trusted to turn off such algorithms. A draft online safety code from Coimisiún na Meán was dropped following lobbying by the big tech companies last year, he said.
Governments alone can act to confront the tech giants and would have public support. “Three-quarters of the public believe there should be stronger regulation of social media algorithms,” he stated.
TD Ruth Coppinger said hateful content was directly responsible for the actions of Kyle Clifford (26) who killed his former partner, her sister and her mother with a crossbow.
His court case in the UK heard that Clifford had watched videos by Andrew Tate before killing the three women.
She suggested that online content was leading to a rise in misogyny among younger men. She cited a survey in which Women’s Aid found 54 per cent of men believe worth is measured by “power and control over others” and 46 per cent felt that “real men shouldn’t care about women’s feelings”.
“Why has the manosphere being allowed to go unchecked by Government?” she asked.
Hope and Courage Collective (previously known as the Far Right Observatory) director Niamh McDonald stated that one account of Irish Instagram had grown to 277,000 followers in less than six months, pushing out racist, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content with three million views a day.
Irish Council for Civil Liberties senior fellow Dr Johnny Ryan said the ICCL withdrew from the Government’s working group on a national counter-disinformation strategy because they perceived the Government was unwilling to include action on social media algorithms.
He said he believes that liberal democracy is under threat from harmful content on the internet.
