Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 30 March 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government

^ General Scheme of Electoral Reform Bill 2020: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Ronan Costello:

I might come in on that, especially because it gives me an opportunity to say something around pseudonymity that I did not say in my first answer. It is the case that a person can have a pseudonymous account. A user need not use a real name on Twitter for the reasons I outlined in my first answer. The second point is that, regardless of the name or handle of the account, the enforcement actions that we take against accounts is the same no matter what. If a person is abusing or harassing someone under a pseudonym or engaging in a spam operation where a person is trying to develop momentum around a particular hashtag or topic such that it gains inorganic primacy on the platform, then we will enforce our rules in the same way against that pseudonymous activity as we would if the person was operating under a real name. The enforcement outcome is the same no matter what. I hope that it clarifies our approach on this.

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