An Oireachtas Committee has stopped short of recommending a blanket social media ban for under-16s, saying it would “unlikely provide a comprehensive solution to the harms experienced by children online”. The Joint Committee on Children and Equality instead calls for tougher regulations, safer platform design, robust age verification and a major investment in digital and media literacy.
The Report on Technology, Social Media and Children, published in October 2026, makes 45 wide-ranging recommendations. They cover legislation and regulation, measures to progress online safety, a public health approach, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and resources.
Under Recommendation 17, the Committee does not back a ban for under-16s but welcomes the proposed EU KIDS Act. The EU’s legislative proposal sets a minimum age of 15 for independent accounts, and supervised “mini” accounts would be available to those aged 13 to 15. The EU also supports a layered regulatory approach to social media and young people, including:
- Children under 13 should not hold traditional social media accounts.
- Access for younger teenagers should be “limited, age appropriate, and subject to parental supervision”.
- Autonomous accounts should be allowed only on services shown to be “safe by design”.
Age verification is central to this approach. Recommendation 7 calls for mandatory, trusted, privacy-preserving third-party verification on high-risk services. The report stresses that age verification should not be a standalone fix, but rather it must work alongside safety-by-design standards and principles.
To inform its deliberations the committee also looked at Australia’s under-16 restrictions as well as France’s experiences with social media legislation. The report’s authors cite research that found 85 percent of under-16 participants in Australia still used the platforms through workarounds and conclude that bans alone have limited effect.
The Committee’s report touches on the scale of young people’s use of social media, which explains the urgency behind its work. The report says 93 percent of children aged 8 to 12 own a smart device, and 99 percent of those aged 12 to 15 have an account on a social media or messaging app with a minimum age of 13. Rather than restricting children, the report argues that changing what platforms do is a better approach.
Children and young people also shaped the Committee’s report. Webwise Youth Advisory Panel members were among the young people who presented to the Joint Committee on Children and Equality back in April 2026. Discussing everything from social media and algorithms to deepfakes, they shared their perspectives on online safety, insights on the experiences of young people online, and what they would like to see change, and had two key recommendations to the Committee.
The first recommendation was to increase government pressure on major technology companies. The young people argued that responsibility cannot fall solely on individual users, parents, or schools – systemic change must come from the platforms themselves. Companies must be held to higher levels of accountability for enforcing safety regulations. Stronger oversight, clearer consequences for non‑compliance, and mandatory safety standards are essential.
The second recommendation made by the Webwise Youth Advisory Panel members was to expand and strengthen digital media literacy education nationwide for children, young people and parents. Young people and adults in Ireland increasingly accept online content at face value, and on top of that AI‑generated misinformation is becoming more realistic and harder to detect. Critical thinking, source‑checking, and understanding how platforms work must become core skills taught consistently across schools and communities. They urged stronger enforcement to hold technology companies accountable and a nationwide expansion of digital media literacy education, so that joined-up education, stronger safeguards, and built-in wellbeing supports are in place across platforms, schools, and society.
The input of the Webwise Youth Advisory Panel is reflected in Recommendation 35 which says media literacy should be delivered consistently, integrated across the curriculum and monitored for progression like other literacy skills. It should reach parents, caregivers and educators as well as children. Similarly, Recommendation 36 seeks universal access to digital citizenship education, including nationwide rollout of initiatives such as the ‘Agree to Agree’ pilot. Recommendation 39 calls for structured, evidence-based parenting supports, including digital literacy for parents.
The recommendations made in the report are wide-ranging and include requiring addictive features to be disabled by default for minors. These include infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic amplification of harmful content and behavioural profiling. Recommendation 1 asks the government to consider reclassifying platforms that use algorithmic curation as publishers.
Coimisiún na Meán, as the regulator, would gain stronger powers under the report’s recommended legislative interventions. These include investigative and information-gathering powers before a formal investigation opens. Its powers under the Online Safety Code would be aligned with the EU Digital Services Act.
The report also calls for Section 30 of the Data Protection Act to be commenced, to address the micro-targeting and profiling of children. It recommends robust legislation against child sexual abuse material, and the report notes that 98 percent of deepfake videos online are pornography.
The Committee describes its overall stance as “nuanced, child’s rights-based, evidence-informed” and rooted in public health. Under Recommendation 45, the UNCRC would be fully incorporated into domestic law. The report treats children as rights-holders under Article 12, entitled to have their views heard on decisions that affect them.
