Campaign Proposal

The Gen Free Campaign policy proposal has three strands: 

  1. Regulation – specific and effective legislation to protect children online.

  2. Education - digital media literacy in school, smartphone-free Primary & Secondary schools (until effective legislation is in place), programmes for parents.

  3. Supports – funding & resources for public health awareness campaign, wellbeing training & support, services for schools.

Strand 1: Regulation

Under this strand, our demand is that the Irish government introduce robust legislation to ensure that internet service providers create an online environment that is safe by default, where there is a clear legal obligation to prevent dissemination of content that is harmful to children and young people under 18.

We request that this legislation will protect children and young people under 18 from the following: 

  • Adult content - sexual content, sexual and extreme violence

  • Harmful content as defined in the Online Safety & Media Regulation Act as well as extending this definition to include misogynistic  content, gambling and features that are akin to gambling like loot boxes

  • Features that are associated with psychological dependence such as ‘likes, follows, views’ and comments

  • Features that disrupt attention such as group chat notifications & autoplay features

  • Recommender algorithm systems used in content feeds to promote engagement

  • The risks (to wellbeing, development, safety, privacy etc) associated with the ability to share / upload photos and/or videos

  • From being contacted by or connecting privately online with people unknown to the child or young person offline

  • The safety risks associated with having their personal information (e.g. full name, address, phone number etc) shared publicly and/or with people unknown to them offline

  • The safety risks associated with having location information shared online (e.g. live location tracking and tagging such as pinning location on images and maps showing location or tracking of routes travelled) 

  • The psychological dependence among peers and other risks associated with having usage patterns publicly displayed e.g. when user was last online, message delivered / read indicators.

  • The impact of beautification filters on self-image and wellbeing

  • The impact of personalised search results (i.e. creation of filter bubbles on online platforms, as opposed to a generic view of search results) 

  • The compromising of a child’s personal data and privacy by online service providers’ methods of advertising, profiling and data collection

To support the above, we ask that Internet providers be required by law to introduce an “opt-in” internet service for adult content sites (gambling, pornography etc) with robust age verification - assumes you are under 18 by default, and you verify that you are over 18 to access these sites.