Debate contribution: Social Media: Children and Young People

Debate contribution by Ms Emma Sheerin on 10 February 2026.

MLA

Ms Emma Sheerin

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

10 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Social Media: Children and Young People

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5435928

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Go raibh maith agat, a Phríomh-Leas-Cheann Comhairle.

I thank the Member who proposed the motion today. We tabled the amendment not because we are completely opposed to a social media ban for under-16s in the long term but because we want to have a conversation and a debate about it. The Member referred to that in her opening remarks. The technologies are moving incredibly fast. Things are developing faster than a lot of Governments across the world can respond to them, and we do not have the empirical evidence yet to tell us what the result of a ban would be. All of us in the House and across the North want our children and young people to be protected. As MLAs, we engage daily with parents, schools and young people who cannot get access to transport to school, cannot get the special educational needs (SEN) provision that they need and need better services in their areas. We are here to work for them, and we want to see things improve for our young people, whether that is in the real world or online. Our fear about jumping into a ban without understanding the full repercussions is the risk that things will end up being forced underground, and we will end up with VPNs and other technologies that, I admit, I am far too old to understand becoming the norm. It will end up being even more difficult to deal with. When it comes to the issue of online abuse, particularly of our young people and children, Sinn Féin is clear that we need to ban Elon Musk's X Grok tool, which undresses people without their consent and robs people of their dignity and of their bodily autonomy.

That is a question of basic decency that should not need any government intervention. That should be banned outright, and anybody who accesses those platforms should know that.

Those multimillionaires are making money off people's misery: we know that. They can access the information that is being shared on those platforms, and they can monitor it. They know what is going online. The same goes for Mark Zuckerberg's misinformation, with Facebook feeds full of hatred, misinformation and far-right fearmongering. Who ends up suffering? Our minority communities are being attacked. That is what we want to ban. That is what we want to see clear action on, and the British Government need to respond to that. The same goes for Instagram. Multimillionaires and billionaires are making advertising revenue off unattainable beauty standards, pushing an algorithm into young people's feeds, particularly young girls, telling them that they are not good enough and that this is what they need to do to change. We need to see action on that. All of the societal problems that we have, including bullying and mistreatment of people, particularly of young people and other vulnerable groups in society, are amplified online. We want to see regulation of those big tech companies. We need to engage with our young people, who tell us clearly that they want to see better reporting functions and better regulation of online content. We want those problems to be dealt with, rather than jumping to remove the provision from our young people before we have assessed what the implications of that would be.

548 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:52 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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