Professor Brian MacCraith:

I will take the first question and pass the second question - on misinformation and algorithms - to Mr. Little, who is the most appropriate person to answer on the basis of his experience in the past and the role of Kinzen, his current company. I will turn to Mr. Munro on the role of the proposed media commission. The Senator is correct in what he says about the functionality and the role of that commission. While we cannot go into detail on that, the new commission will play a very important role.

I thank the Senator for his positive comments on the vaccination programme. At the very beginning, we knew from international experience that anti-vax sentiment on social media platforms would be an issue, particularly as we look down through the age cohorts. We are getting down through them, thankfully, and we will reach 30-year-olds very shortly. We had direct engagement with Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, in the first instance as a task force. Subsequently, the HSE and the Department of Health have had ongoing engagements with those platforms, as well as Kinzen. I will let its founder, Mr. Little, speak about that in a moment. We engaged in terms of their co-operation in tackling this and directing individuals to reliable sites with reliable information. As the Senator knows, it is a battle one can never win. One must keep engaging with it all the time. There have been Europe-leading levels of uptake of the vaccine in Ireland so far. We are now vaccinating those in their 40s. This is a good sign that people in Ireland have been turning to trusted sources of information and have not, so far, been overly influenced by continuing anti-vax activity. It was very noticeable at the weekend when the European Medicines Agency came out with a statement that it was experiencing a lot of negative anti-vax material on social media platforms. What is the lesson learned? Certainly, Ireland is fortunate to have a significant presence of social media platforms which have been very positive and collaborative with us in this regard. We have learned the importance of ongoing engagement and collaboration with them. There might be a broader message in that for other issues we must deal with.

I ask Mr. Little to speak about the more specific issues around technology, misinformation and the algorithms associated with it.