Ms Liz Carolan:

On whether I believe the Bill will achieve its stated objectives, it is my opinion that it will not. It will prevent overseas groups from directly purchasing advertising targeting Irish voters because it will place a legal obligation on platforms to carry out due diligence in respect of people who are purchasing political advertisements. Beyond that, however, I cannot find anything else in the Bill.

Many information operations focus on voter suppression, which takes the form of fake voter boycott campaigns that are targeted at particular groups. We saw such campaigns used against African Americans in the US. It was claimed that, because some people they did not like Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, they would vote for no one even though we know that there was a 90% chance African Americans were going to vote for Democrats. That was effectively a voter suppression campaign and was run out of Moscow, as far as the intelligence services can tell. We have an element of complacency in Ireland in this regard. Where a Border poll or future vote on EU constitutional issues is concerned, we are at serious risk. We would be slightly less at risk with this Bill, but we would not be fully there.

The Deputy asked how to ensure that a body like the one outlined in the Bill was accountable so that it did not just change the rules halfway through an electoral period. That is a difficult thing to ensure and I do not envy the legislative drafters who must try to sort out that puzzle. Speaking as a political scientist rather than a lawyer or legislative draftsperson, the best approach is to have a tightly defined set of outcomes that we want the electoral commission to achieve, a defined set of powers to be able to achieve them, and proper checks and balances, for example, a requirement for setting rules six months before an election based on an assessment of the latest developments in campaign technology. Those rules would then have to go before a committee like this one or some other accountable body. It would be important for the commission to have the statutory power to compel private companies to take certain actions, in particular around transparency measures. Outside the realm of hate speech or other such concepts, it is dangerous to give anyone the power to compel the taking down or removal of content from a freedom of expression point of view, but the commission should be able to go to a company that has a new product it had not anticipated and tell the company that, at a minimum, it must publish information on who is giving it money, who is spending, etc.