Colman Noctor: Let’s teach our young people to pause and think before they post online

A post can be pollinated to thousands in seconds, often without any thought for the person at the centre of the footage

Young people must be taught not to like or share content that distresses another person. Picture: iStock

LAST week interim justice minister Simon Harris launched the ‘Serious Consequences’ awareness campaign to warn people that threatening to share intimate images of another person is a crime.

While the campaign is new, the legislation — known as Coco’s Law — has been in place since February 2021. A child under 17 can only be charged with such an offence with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Recently, footage of a teenager being assaulted in Navan was circulated on social media. While such incidents are not new, sharing images and videos is a contemporary phenomenon that we must negotiate.

The capacity to capture and share incidents with smartphones in real time is a double-edged sword. Without the footage, identifying the perpetrators of assaults is difficult, but using the footage to destroy the victim’s reputation is inexcusable.

I have treated many young people who have been casualties of similar incidents, with footage of them being cruelly pranked in a school bathroom or intimate images of them shared among large online communities. The social and psychological ramifications of these types of incidents are profound. 

One young client believed that moving school was his only option, but the footage of him had been shared in schools within a 60km radius of his home. His experience illustrates the dangers of the global village: Once content is shared, it cannot be managed or controlled. A post can be pollinated to thousands in seconds, often without any thought for the person in the footage.

Technology companies need to regulate content before it is uploaded, rather than the victim going through the complex process of trying to have it taken down.

Post-event intervention is flawed and ineffective. However, the designers of these platforms are unlikely to vet posts before they are made widely available, not because it is too difficult to do, but because the internet’s secret sauce is that it’s unregulatable.

Designers know that regulation, age verification, and content vetting would mark the end of social media’s appeal, so we need to concentrate on the technology users, not the technology. Given the limitations of the technology to retrieve content that has been uploaded, the focus needs to be on stopping users from sharing this type of content in the first place.

Don’t encourage the bully

Focusing on the actions of bystanders is critical if we are to curtail bullying. When bullies or aggressors lose the support of the online or offline gallery, they no longer hold power. The attention of the bystander is the currency and fuel for the cruel performative action. If the people around the aggressors starved them of attention and endorsement, it would soon stop the bullying.

This is all very well in theory, but going from a bystander to an upstander is difficult. We all like to think we would stand up and intervene if we witnessed an injustice, but your reaction can be quite different when you are in that situation. How many of us have seen a couple having a serious argument and, rather than intervene and see if both parties are OK, we ignore them and cross the road? How many of us have watched a small child being harshly treated by a parent in public and kept walking? Most of us have been that soldier at some point. We fail to act because we fear the aggressor turning on us. The fear of becoming the target of the aggressor’s anger is real and understandable. So asking young people to advocate and risk becoming the target is too much to expect.

However, asking young people not to endorse the aggressor’s actions by ‘liking’ or sharing the incident on social media seems a good place to start. We are all guilty of rubbernecking and slowing down to look at a road-traffic accident; it is often an involuntary action that keeps us watching a dramatic incident to see how it unfolds. But filming and sharing the accident with others is inexcusable.

Sharing online material involves some degree of thought and intent, and it is imperative that we intercept the process to help young people consider the potential victims in these scenarios and help stamp it out.

Instead of embarrassing footage of someone else being regarded as content that will boost your online popularity or get you more followers, young people need to see it as an act to be frowned upon. ‘Culture eats policy for breakfast’. Therefore it’s vital to create a culture in which sharing content that embarrasses or humiliates is regarded as a profoundly undesirable act that reflects poorly on the person sharing it. In the evolving AI (artificial intelligence) world, the regulation of technology may be a utopian ideology, but a culture that disapproves of the sharing of humiliating content is a distinct possibility.

Change the culture

We have seen in Ireland in recent decades how cultures can shift. When legislation made it illegal to leave children in the back of a car without seatbelts, for example, something that was previously socially acceptable no longer was. There is no reason we can’t do the same with online sharing. And let us not underestimate how the impact of small collective actions can lead to large-scale change.

While no country has solved the sharing of harmful content online, Britain is making a concerted effort. The UK’s Online Safety Bill aims to introduce laws to regulate video-sharing platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitch.

British psychologist Jo Hemming points out that exposure to harmful content can desensitise young people and that people react differently when they see something harmful in real life — they report it to the police or a parent — than when they see the same thing in the virtual world.

A 2022 UK Ofcom study found that nearly a third of 13-to-17-year-olds didn’t report potentially harmful online content, because they did not consider it bad enough to do something about it.

Along with the Serious Consequences campaign, we also need to consider a campaign that deems the sharing of embarrassing footage of another person as irresponsible, cruel and damaging.

While we have little influence over how tech companies respond, sharing content is entirely within our power.

Let’s teach our young people to pause before they post and think about the consequences of what they share, so they can self-police their online communities.

We must commit to a future where the sharing of damaging content is unacceptable.

• Dr Colman Noctor is a child psychotherapist