Dr. Jane Suiter:

In Ireland, we have been doing quite a lot of work on disinformation. It has been led by the Department of the Taoiseach, which has been quite involved in it. As the Senator knows, parts of this are being addressed by the Future of Media Commission. I could not say for sure where I think it best sits, but looking at election and political misinformation, what we have transposed here is text that we came up with in the previous century. As a result, this does not in any way tackle the problem of disinformation in elections and so on, yet we know some things that will do that.

I am not sure that it is the place for the commission. Obviously, this is something that is evolving. There was a call last week but, unfortunately, there were technical problems so it was difficult to understand exactly what is happening with that. The European Commissioner on data had a piece in the Irish Independentjust yesterday on issues relating to data protection of which we must be cognisant and to which the Senator may have been referring. This is probably one of the good places to put some of that detail in and start trying to think about how we might legislate for it. If we rely on US corporations or even European legislation, it is not clear how far we will go in terms of content yet we know that the content itself matters - not just the transparency, which is where Europe is going. One of the researchers who works with me, Eileen Culloty, has been on the websites of a number of the far-right groups that are manufacturing some of this disinformation, on places like Parler and Gab, and has found a very clear pattern which shows that some of the discourse that is starting in QAnon groups in the US is arriving in Ireland. We are beginning to see more of that appearing in Facebook groups and people start to believe it so it is something that would be of concern for all Members of the Oireachtas. This is where it might be good to start thinking about how we might tackle that.