Jess Kelly

Young people, so 13 and 14 year olds will still be able to access, and indeed 15 year olds will still be able to access social media, but they will be

100% in the right category, i.e.

teen accounts or whatever, with whatever platform based precautions are in place.

And then the onus will be on the social platforms to ensure that no harmful content is accessed by that age group.

That's my understanding.

And that's what's been explained to me.

The notion of a ban, I think it's a very big word.

It's a very broad term.

And as you said, in the case of Australia, it doesn't actually work.

Yeah, well, now I heard Minister O'Donovan on with Anton Savage on Friday's Newstalk Breakfast.

And, you know, he has stressed that he is adamant this is a priority and that something will be done.

And the point that he was making is if an EU agreement can't be reached, Ireland will go it alone.

But that doesn't mean Ireland's introducing a ban.

It's introducing that verification step.

But it was very interesting at the Oireachtas committee because one of the TDs or senators asked the executives from social media and tech companies their view on this, the verification at an OS level, so on the device itself.

So Meta and TikTok said that they were in favour of it.

But it was really interesting to hear a representative from Google saying that they wouldn't be in favour of it.

And the analogy that she gave, which did give me pause, was...

was that when somebody walks into a supermarket, you don't ask for ID, you ask for ID when they go to buy booze.

And so her point there was, you shouldn't have to do this for people accessing every single website or access to the internet as a whole.