Irish Online Safety Regulator Adopts Safety Code for Meta, TikTok, Others, to Protect Underage
Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán (CnaM), has issued the completed Online Safety Code after over a year of development to protect the underage.
From next month, video-sharing platforms headquartered in the country, including the likes of ByteDance’s TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook Reels, are required to have terms and conditions that ban uploads or sharing of a range of harmful content types.
The contents include cyberbullying, promoting self-harm or suicide, and promoting eating or feeding disorders, in addition to banning content that incites hatred violence, and terrorism.
It also requires platforms to protect children from pornography and violent content, as well as to provide proper age verification methods.
Adam Hurley, spokesman for Coimisiún na Meán, acknowledged that the Code aims to address content types not immediately covered by the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
Newsng gathered that the specified sites must implement parental controls for content that may “impair” physical, mental, or moral development in children under the age of sixteen.
Under the new regulation, each video-sharing platform will also need to publish an action plan stating the measures it will take to support media literacy – a plan that the platforms will need to update every year.
“One of the thoughts behind the Online Safety Code is dealing with content which is more harmful rather than illegal,” Hurley told us, adding: “What we’ve done is broaden the scope to harmful content that they must prohibit uploading of and then act on reports against those terms and conditions.”
We earlier reported that the British Competition Commission has approved the adjustments that Facebook parent company Meta has suggested to the way it handles advertisement data on its social media networks.
