Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10 ============================================================ Holly Cairns (SD), Cork South-West This is something governments across the world are grappling with and in many ways the horse has already bolted. Social media companies have been around for 20 years and they have never been properly regulated. To date, it has been self-regulation which has amounted to no regulation at all. Now we are playing catch up. One things is clear; the algorithms are increasingly dangerous. Violent, racist and misogynistic content is not just tolerated but it is literally boosted by these algorithms, making them go viral. I recognise there are loads of things in the Taoiseach's list of things the Government is looking at but none of them were the algorithms and a lot of them placed the responsibility on the user and on teaching the user about safety online. What we need to do, as a very first and obvious step, is address the algorithms. Will the Taoiseach reconsider, and will he look at this? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-10/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-10