Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 26 May 2021
Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht
General Scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2020: Discussion (Resumed)
Dr. T.J. McIntyre:
It strikes me the definition is so wide that it would criminalise or certainly prohibit material from Phoenixmagazine's mainly political cartoons. An aspect that is troubling is it relies on intention. It refers to the intention of the person who wrote or sent something. This would suggest that if I took a piece of newspaper coverage of a scandal and sent it to someone with the view of humiliating the person who was behind that scandal, that act would be prohibited, based on my subjective intention. That is very worrying for two reasons. First, it focuses on subjective rather than objective intention. To that extent it does not matter that there is an objective public value in me being able to share this news article or political cartoon. Second, it places a significant burden on the tech firms to assess the subjective intention of the person who is sharing this particular news article or cartoon. Certainly, in its current form it is unworkable.
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