Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

I do not believe that what we are arguing for is a watering down of the provisions in the legislation. I think we are arguing that the provisions should be more effective and should give the regulator the appropriate tools with which to engage with companies such as ours to establish the practices that are in place and also to be able to react and adapt to any new threats coming down the road.

Regarding our approach to the definition of social issues and electoral political ads, I had a quick look at the ads library this morning. It contains ads from NGOs and from companies dealing with sustainability, sustainable energy etc. We believe all that influences the democratic process here and that is why we require those individuals and organisations to go through those steps and measures to put it into the ads library so that everyone can see what the ad is, who is paying for it, the categories of targeting that were used, what the spend range is and other details on the ad.

That is the point on definition. How that is different from what the Government is suggesting? It is not clear to us what a political purpose ad is. It is one thing to say it contains content about social issues, electoral issues or political issues and that is a far more objective test than trying to figure out what the intention of somebody behind the advertisement is. That is the point we are making. It is moving from the subjective to a more objective test.

On the point of microtargeting, the releasing of the targeting criteria is the main thing academics have been calling for since 2016 or 2017. We have real privacy concerns over releasing the targeting criteria within the EU. However, we are not saying that we have privacy concerns, and that we are just throwing our hands up and saying we can do nothing about it.

We have been engaging with the European Commission in recent years and with academics at a European level to figure out what would work-----