Jess Kelly

I'd love to know your thoughts because I think it's really useful having the tech companies at these Oireachtas committees.

There's a slight element of Groundhog Day in terms of what they're able to tell us and what they do tell us.

But I did think it was notable that there was more talk on the addiction side rather than just focusing on the content as has previously been the case.

Yeah.

Now, one thing that we spoke about when that case, Kayleigh's case, was ongoing was the definition of addiction.

The CEO of Instagram said,

Spent a lot of time in the box trying to determine the definition of Instagram, saying that there was no clear sort of medical diagnosis as such.

I just played a clip there of Richard Collard of TikTok who also refuted the word addiction.

Were you like me kind of banging your head on your desk whilst watching it at the utmost refusal to acknowledge any form of addictive addiction?

design with these various platforms?

100%.

And it was really interesting.

And I think one of the most impactful parts of this particular sitting and sort of coming together of this committee was the fact that they've heard from young people, the TDs and the Senators, they've heard from young people and they consistently referred to that over the last wee while.

But I found it really interesting listening to, you know, Julta O'Brien of Meta, the executives from the other social companies, again, refuting that their business model relied on people staying on the platform.

They were saying things like, you know, safety and well-being is of core concern to us.

They also refuted the notion of, you know, the platforms not having safety ingrained into the DNA of the platforms.

It's...

Again, I just find it baffling to see the conviction with which they can say these things when, I know from conversations I've had with you over the last 10 years, that's just fundamentally not the case.

They weren't built with safety in mind.

This is something that they've retrospectively put features in place to try and address.