Irish Examiner view: Social media exploits children

The report suggests that over one quarter of children surveyed had experienced bullying online.

The CyberSafetyKids annual report published yesterday is welcome, because it offers precise details for many people’s unease about young children and their online activity.

The report suggests that over one quarter of children surveyed had experienced bullying online, while almost two thirds said that they had been contacted by a stranger while playing an online game.

Those numbers cannot be easily dismissed in terms of their scale. Almost 90% of those surveyed had social media or instant messaging accounts of their own, despite minimum age restrictions of 13 which are supposed to apply to the most popular of those apps.

While parental supervision is obviously the first port of call when it comes to what children access, it’s clear that parents are not getting much support by the companies involved.

The day before the CyberSafetyKids report was published we learned that Meta, the company which owns Instagram, was fined €405m by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) for violating children’s privacy. The breaches potentially affected millions of teenage users of Instagram, as phone numbers and email addresses were published automatically under default settings on the app’s “business account” service.

This is not the first time the DPC has called Meta to task. Twelve months ago the company was fined €225m for what the DPC described as “severe” breaches of privacy laws in
relation to WhatsApp, another company owned by Meta. At that time the DPC was also investigating TikTok — a separate organisation — in relation to transfers of user data to China, where TikTok’s parent company is based.

As a glimpse of the sheer power of such companies, it is instructive that Meta can absorb fines of almost two-thirds of a billion euro and continue to operate.

It’s deeply worrying, however, that an organisation of that size has been found guilty of violating the privacy of children more than once.