James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. This is the second of three stakeholder engagements on my Bill.

There has been a pattern throughout history that societies which better understand technology have supplanted and bested those which did not. We have seen this in areas such as sanitation and disease management, steel and guns, shipbuilding and navigation, as well as micromanagement and administration of government. Those that understand technology and can master it typically triumph over those who are less cognisant of it. In the modern context, the Internet and information communications technology are a great example of that. Our laws have struggled to keep pace with the Internet age. The area of electoral campaigning is no different.

The Bill sets out to address this. It does not attempt to address every problem of the Internet age or every difficulty in electoral campaigning. That would require a broad brush and would not be possible through a Private Members' Bill. An editorial in The Irish Timesdescribed the Bill as a modest but important step, however, in that regard. It is modest and deliberately narrow and tight in scope to deal with online electoral campaigning. It tries to bring some degree of regulation to this area. We have seen many examples of problems in this regard in recent elections. We are conscious of alleged influence in the Brexit vote, the ongoing hearings on the US presidential vote and the French presidential election. The Cambridge Analytica scandal brought to the fore many electoral examples throughout the developed and developing world. In our recent referendum, Google and Facebook banned certain electoral advertising on their platforms.

It is incumbent on legislators, policymakers and stakeholders to take action and to come up with a reasonable response to these threats. These threats include anonymous or misleading advertising, hiding behind Internet secrecy to run falsified campaigns, masquerading as someone else and concealing from the public who is trying to influence them. There have been breaches of spending rules. It is often used as a backdoor to get around election spending limits by running multiple campaigns from different accounts without any disclosure or attribution. Ultimately, it boils down to attempts to defraud the electorate. There are also issues such as microtargeting and the deliberate use of bots to generate fake organic website traffic. This is the attempt to make a particular social media posting more popular than it is which, in turn, is intended to influence public opinion.

All of this is rife. Offline channels of electoral campaigning, be they pamphlets, print media, posters or broadcast media, are covered in great detail by the Electoral Act 1992. Unfortunately, we have yet to produce any regulation for the Internet age. It is important that the principle of free speech be front and centre of any regulation. I have attempted to strike the right balance between regulation and respecting free speech. The Bill does not set out to censor or silence anybody. It merely sets out to have disclosure and transparency around who is posting what and who is sponsoring it. It is technologically and ideologically neutral.

I have read the submissions and I have closely followed the debate on the Bill in recent months. I anticipate there may be a suggestion that certain definitions in the Bill require fine-tuning and could be overly broad or overly narrow. I take these concerns at face value. However, almost every definition in the Bill is borrowed from previous legislation such as the electoral and broadcasting Acts. If it were inconsistent in this regard, then, accordingly, if the Bill were enacted, it would follow that the electoral and broadcasting Acts would have to be amended. I do not believe anyone proposes to follow that course of action. Instead, the Bill can be fine-tuned on Committee Stage to strengthen its provisions and ensure robust regulation for electoral campaigning in the Internet age. While the referendum is over, European and local elections, as well as possible general and presidential elections, will come up in the next 12 months. This issue will not go away anytime soon. Ireland has been in the eye of the storm with global media interest in the recent referendum. There is an opportunity for Ireland to become a leader in this area. Many legislatures have attempted this but none have got it right yet. I have been in correspondence with international counterparts. There is a consensus that the Bill is a move in the right direction and has the potential to be the first legislation of its kind to be passed anywhere in the world. This would put us on the world stage and there is no reason we cannot do that. I look forward to the debate and I thank the witnesses for attending.