Irish media regulator has 'arsenal of tools' to tackle online child sex material
Coimisiun na Mean, which published a three-year strategy and a 2025 work programme on Thursday, said that sex abuse images appearing online are increasing in their prevalence.
Niamh Hodnett, the coimisiun's online safety commissioner, said it holds social media platforms to account under the Online Safety Framework.
Child sex abuse material is covered by the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The coimisiun said that two of its priorities under its revised strategy include an election integrity strategy and protections for children at risk of online harm.
It will soon develop a pilot programme for children at imminent risk of harm from online content, as well as develop an election integrity strategy across all media sources, and create educational materials relating to online hate.
Speaking at its offices in south Dublin on Thursday, Ms Hodnett said that further online protection for children will begin in July this year when the final part of the Online Safety Code comes into effect.
"This includes restricting harmful video content such as cyber-bullying, the promotion of eating or feeding disorders, the promotion of self-harm or suicide, as well as dangerous challenges," she said.
"There are detailed provisions for age assurance and parental controls in relation to adult content. We'll continue to supervise platforms with respect to their compliance with the Online Safety framework.
"The pilot programme is to inform our approach as to how we can best protect children online with our strategic outcome.
"There was an expert report prepared in relation to individual complaints, and that advised waiting a year from when the Online Safety Code is in place before we look to putting in place an individual complaints framework and what that would look like, starting with children.
"We hope, through this pilot programme, to address children who are in imminent danger and imminent harm in a systematic way.
"We do it at the moment on an ad hoc basis. Indeed, even yesterday evening, my colleague John (Evans) was dealing with a priority one instance of a child in harm.
"At the moment, when those types of contacts come into our contact centre, they're given priority one status, and we deal with them. But what that pilot scheme would do is to look at doing that in a systemic way, so that's something we're scoping out, and that will then inform our future work in relation to individual complaints."
Ms Hodnett said they are becoming increasingly concerned about AI-generated child sex abuse material.
"It's ever-increasing in its prevalence and there's two types we're concerned about. One is self-generated child sex abuse material, so that would be generated by children, often in their bedroom unbeknownst to their parents, for extortion or other purposes.
"Then the other we're concerned about is AI-generated child sex abuse material. So this is being generated by artificial intelligence. Both are increasing in prevalence, and we're very concerned about that.
"We are responsible for holding the platforms to account under the Online Safety Framework. Child sex abuse material is covered by the Digital Services Act, so in terms of our close supervision of the platforms, that's an area that we engage with them regularly on, and that we're very concerned about.
"We have the full arsenal of tools within our playbook to be able to deal with that."
She said the coimisiun recently met with OpenAI, in which they discussed concerns about online safety, including AI-generated sex abuse images.
John Evans, the Digital Service Commissioner, said that OpenAI's user numbers are growing.
He said: "As part of our supervision programme, we would have relationships with all of the platforms. So, say we have 15 of the 25 very large online platforms based in Ireland. So we have relationships with all of those.
"Some of the others are getting bigger. So OpenAI, for example, its user numbers have been growing.
"We pay attention to how they're moving, and how important they become in the ecosystem in terms of the user numbers, or the more risky they become as we perceive them because of the kind of content that they're able to provide. We will pay more and more closer attention to them.
"It's a risk-based approach to supervision, there's something like 150 or so platforms out there. So we need a way of focusing our activity."
Mr Evans said that when engaging with large tech firms, it would rather see a change in their behaviour rather than threatening large companies with enforcement measures or big fines.
However, he said the coimisiun and the European Commission are using the "sharper tools" in their toolbox, including the investigations into some social media companies.
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