Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 7 November 2019
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment
Session 3: The State of Play in Regulation
Mr. Marc Rotenberg:
I certainly think the business model needs to be changed. Facebook should be prohibited from using the platform for political advertising today. That is a concrete action that is supported by plenty of evidence. Other companies are already doing it.
I will make a further point, in partial response to Ms Brown's first question to Mr. Cesarini. A good friend of mine, the former European Data Protection Supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, who recently passed away, addressed the issue of election integrity last spring. He made a very important point. He said that, in his view, transparency and content management will not be sufficient to solve this problem. This is about the collection and use of personal data. If our aim is to safeguard the integrity of elections and to limit fake news, we must enforce these privacy obligations. Transparency will not be a substitute for doing so. Mr. Buttarelli was exactly correct on that.
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