Will we continue to take TikTok’s money after M9 crash? Too bloody true we will

In Irish common law, the charming euphemism for being a pimp is “living off immoral earnings”. It would be ridiculously crude to suggest that Ireland pimps itself out to the social media oligarchs. But the State nonetheless gives the same reply as the soldier in the duet in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage who is asked whether he would live off immoral earnings: “Yes, too bloody true I would.”When horrors such as the M9 carnage happen we are collectively outraged by the part played by TikTok’s reckless dissemination of videos that encourage boys to show off suicidal (and murderous) stunts. But will we continue to take TikTok’s money? Too bloody true we will.Last week, as public and political indignation was reaching its crescendo, TikTok’s Dublin operation was finalising (another sweet euphemism here) “mutual termination agreements” with more than 300 workers at its European headquarters on Grand Canal Dock in Dublin. According to The Irish Times, “The majority of the affected roles are within the company’s trust and safety division.”In other words, TikTok is planning to devote not more but fewer resources to keeping people (especially young people) safe online. “Trust and safety” are, for the social media oligarchs, unnecessary fripperies.READ MORESafety, for them, is a double cost. There are the salaries for those employed to monitor dangerous content. But there’s also the loss of that content and the revenue that flows from all the lovely and lucrative engagement it generates. Expecting a social media platform to be enthusiastic about removing unsafe posts is like asking publicans to police excessive drinking – they may refuse to serve the odd drunk, but they know the heaviest drinkers are the best customers.And we get what loan sharks and bookies call the vig – the juice, the take, the margin. TikTok’s Dublin operation booked $862 million in revenue in 2024. We took something like $13.16 million in corporation tax from that. TikTok also paid out €250 million in salaries and PRSI. If we very conservatively estimate that a third of that went to the exchequer, that brings the State’s vig to about €95 million in all. Meta, meanwhile, booked $85 billion of revenue at its Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd subsidiary in 2024. According to its accounts all of this “was attributable to growth in advertising revenue from third-party customers generated by displaying ad products on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and third-party mobile applications”. Meta Platforms Ireland paid us €366 million in corporation tax. Again, if we did a crude calculation that a third of its wage bill of €450 million went on tax and PRSI, that brings the Meta vig to more than €500 million.These are immoral earnings. The social media platforms are not neutral channels through which images and messages happen to pass. They are the pushers of deliberately addictive and toxic products, from which they make vast profits. As Arturo Béjar, a former Meta safety engineer, last week told the trial of the civil action in which 29 US states are suing the corporation, Meta operates a “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy when it comes to the safety of children. And why would it do otherwise? A study by the Harvard School of Public Health estimated that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from American children in 2022. That’s four years ago and it relates only to the US – the revenue worldwide in 2026 must be very much higher.We should not hesitate to call this evil. What other word is adequate to describe the scale of the perfidy involved in the systematic pushing at children of material that hooks them on self-harm, violence, misogyny and hate? Addiction is not a side effect; it is the business model.But it’s part of Ireland’s business model too. In June, before Ireland took up the EU presidency, some of the world’s leading independent experts, led by Shoshana Zuboff (author of the seminal The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), wrote an open letter to the Financial Times calling on Ireland to recuse itself from any discussion on the regulation of the social media giants. They suggested, essentially, that Ireland is too compromised to be trusted. And it’s hard to argue that they’re wrong. In 2023, the Irish Data Protection Commission took the extraordinary step of suing the European Data Protection Board (effectively all the other EU national data protection authorities) for insisting that Ireland carry out more thorough investigations into Meta.It lost the case but succeeded brilliantly in enhancing Ireland’s international reputation for treating the tech bros as sugar daddies. The appointment of Meta’s former chief lobbyist in Ireland to be a current data protection commissioner – who no doubt does the job without fear or favour – didn’t do much to change that outside perception.Small wonder that TikTok last week declined an invitation to attend a hearing of the Oireachtas media committee. It knows that the weeping and wailing and demands for accountability are no less performative than the deadly stunts it purveys on its platform. Politicians, too, are hoping for likes.The fact is that we don’t just collude with evil – we benefit from it. There is no doubt that a good chunk of the revenue Meta and TikTok book here comes from selling ads targeted at children. Or that a good chunk of those ads pop up on the infinite scroll of excitingly dangerous images. Yet, like Meta, our strategy when it comes to this most flagrant form of child abuse is “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Now and then a particular atrocity forces us to look in the face of the evil with which we connive. After the fuss over the M9 disaster fades away, there will be some other random manifestation of this malevolence: some teen suicides perhaps, or a shocking murder. But that too will pass.Pecunia non olet, the Romans used to say: money doesn’t smell. Which is just as well – otherwise we might choke on the stink of hypocrisy.