Mr. Liam Herrick:

I agree with what Dr. McIntyre has had to say in response to what Senator Hoey said. There are ways in which the grounding of the Bill in human rights and equality principles could be more explicit, and the Law Society has made suggestions in this regard, but that will not get away from the core approach being taken here. Dr. McIntyre has put it very well in saying it applies a broadcasting model aimed at large companies to enforcement against potentially small providers and then, indirectly, to private communications and the private speech of individuals. How this will work in practice is that if companies are under these legal obligations, they will adjust their internal processes and algorithms and so on, which will have a knock-on effect on filtering the communications of ordinary people as well as the effect self-censorship might have. It is difficult to get away from the fundamental human rights principles that apply to this question of vague definitions as to what types of speech might be proscribed. Once you get beyond speech that is clearly illegal, and Digital Rights Ireland has cast some questions as to how even that might be defined, and into harmful content and more vague concepts such as bullying and disinformation, it becomes very difficult to strike an appropriate balance. The approach, we find, is fundamentally flawed in that respect.