Deloitte’s Nicola Flannery discusses how we can contribute to the creation of a safer online world for young people and the wider community.

CyberSafe Kids, in partnership with Deloitte, recently published the 10th annual edition of a report exploring the digital lives of children in Ireland, providing an overview of how they spend their time online, the level of access they have and their overall experiences – both positive and negative. 

The latest report, which is titled ‘The Year Little Changed’, collected data from more than 7,000 children aged eight to 15 across 74 Irish schools during the 2025 to 2026 academic year. This was combined with additional focus group discussions and independent research conducted by students from Atlantic Technological University and University College Dublin.

The aim of the research is to build a larger understanding of trends and risks impacting young people online. It also calls on its audience to create a safer online environment for young people. 

Commenting on the report and its broader potential, Nicola Flannery, a partner for digital trust and privacy, technology and transformation at Deloitte, explained that the report being in its 10th year is significant.

She told SiliconRepublic.com, “This isn’t a one-off snapshot, it’s a decade of tracking how children in Ireland actually experience the online world, which means we can see the direction of travel rather than just a single moment in time. 

“This year’s edition, The Year Little Changed, is particularly significant because it measures what has actually improved since major regulatory changes came into effect.”

Alex Cooney, CEO and co-founder of CyberSafe Kids, added, “This year’s report marks a decade of monitoring the online risks and vulnerabilities facing children and young people in Ireland. And the message from this year’s data is clear – despite a raft of new legislation in Ireland and at the EU level in 2025, very little has changed in relation to children’s online safety one year on.”

Flannery agreed, noting that despite major regulatory changes such as the Online Safety Code and the Digital Services Act (DSA) coming into effect, children in Ireland are still encountering many of the same harms in the same spaces, “without meaningfully better protection than they had before any of this legislation existed”.

“That’s the wake-up call at the heart of the report and it’s a difficult one for anyone who assumed the regulatory groundwork of the last couple of years would already be showing results. I’d say almost everyone with a stake in this space needs to sit with it,” she said. 

Flannery suggested that policymakers, regulators, parents, educators, platform leaders, technologists and business leaders across the wider STEM sectors have a responsibility to read reports such as this and educate themselves on the changes their specific position requires them to make. 

Broader society could also familiarise itself, she noted, “because a lot of this comes down to a business model built around engagement that hasn’t been sufficiently weighed against the cost to children and that’s a conversation that goes well beyond any one regulator or platform”. 

According to Flannery, a number of key findings emerged from the report, such as the issues around age assurance, which was implemented as a means of ensuring younger children are not exposed to age-inappropriate material. 

She is of the opinion that the measure simply isn’t working as it was meant to, as the report indicates 70pc of participating eight- to 12-year-olds continue to own accounts on platforms that require users to be at least 13.   

“Self-declaration remains the main method platforms rely on, which means a child only has to type in a different birth year to get past it – and clearly, a lot of them are doing exactly that without anyone noticing,” she said.  

“What’s interesting is that the [European] Commission seems to agree this is the core problem. Its proposed EU Kids Act states plainly that self-declared age isn’t enough, and would require certified, independent age verification instead, alongside a default minimum age of 15 for opening a social media account without a parent involved. 

“It’s still a proposal rather than law and unlikely to actually apply for another couple of years, but it’s a clear signal that Brussels has looked at exactly the gap this report is describing and decided the current approach has failed.”

Popular gaming platform Roblox came up again and again in the research, with Flannery noting this is for good reason, as it is the platform where young children in Ireland spend the greatest amount of time. 

Almost 60pc of negative interactions reported by children aged eight to 12 were found to have happened on Roblox and included inappropriate avatars, sexual content, grooming attempts, scams, and games built around self-harm themes with no safeguards in place. 

Flannery said, “For a long time, Roblox sat outside the tightest layer of DSA scrutiny, though that’s actually just changed. The European Commission designated it a Very Large Online Platform at the end of August, which brings a stricter set of obligations into play from early next year. 

“That’s a step in the right direction, but designation on paper and genuinely safer experiences for an eight-year-old are still two different things, and that gap is exactly what this report is measuring.”

Unsurprisingly, AI also presents a challenge to protecting young people online. More than half of the eight-to-12 cohort and 76pc of 12- to 15-year-olds said that they use AI tools, and nearly half admitted that no one has ever had a conversation with them about artificial intelligence at all. 

Flannery said, “We spent the last decade rolling out social media to children faster than we built the safeguards around it and we appear to be making precisely the same choice with AI, at a faster pace and with less public conversation about what’s actually at stake. 

“It’s worth saying that the proposed EU Kids Act doesn’t stop at social media either. It explicitly covers AI companions and chatbots, with specific restrictions around emotional dependency and memory features aimed at younger users. 

“That’s a genuinely forward-looking piece of drafting, but again, it’s not law yet, and children are forming these habits with AI right now, well ahead of any protection actually landing.”

Viewed collectively, she explained that harm is never confined to just one form of content or platform. Rather, it is structural, and permeates the entire digital ecosystem to which children already have significant access.

“Regulation as it currently stands is proving to be necessary but nowhere near sufficient on its own.”

Cooney added, “We still see high levels of underage access to social media platforms with a 13-plus age rating, and the same numbers reporting upsetting experiences (25pc) and bullying behaviour (28pc). The regulation designed to protect children online either isn’t working, isn’t fit for purpose or isn’t being sufficiently enforced – or a combination of all three.”

Making the environment safer for vulnerable young people requires accepting a level of responsibility that moves far beyond issues of compliance. 

Flannery finds that the STEM leaders shaping the digital infrastructure that people have come to depend on need to be conscious of how their choices in design, algorithm development and business models have major downstream impacts on society, posing real harm to children. 

“The trouble is that the current model treats child safety as a constraint to be managed rather than a design principle to be embedded from the start. Platforms build in safety measures after something has already gone wrong, responding to harm instead of preventing it, and that’s the wrong way round,” she said. 

“STEM leaders have both the power and, I’d argue, the obligation to do things differently. That starts with embedding safety by design as a foundational principle rather than a bolt-on feature, which means age-appropriate design as standard, no engagement-maximising algorithms aimed at children, no behavioural profiling, no dark patterns.”

She thinks it also means pushing back on regulatory timelines that are blatantly unrealistic and instead focusing on what is genuinely achievable. This means investing properly in research and talent, and being upfront about necessary trade-offs, in her view. 

Flannery noted, “Safety often sits in tension with engagement and monetisation, and leaders need to be transparent about where they stand rather than letting that tension go unspoken. 

“Parents, educators, policymakers and children themselves are looking to STEM leaders to do the right thing here – and right now, the evidence suggests that isn’t happening on the scale it needs to.”

Cooney concluded, “More than 7,300 children were surveyed, providing crucial first-hand insights into the realities of growing up online today. What some of these children describe encountering online is deeply concerning and it highlights the urgency of the work still needed to make their online world safer.”

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