Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 June 2021

Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media

Making Europe Fit for the Digital Age: EU Commissioner for Competition

Ms Margrethe Vestager:

The idea of the Digital Services Act is to make sure we have processes that ensure illegal content is taken down and that legal content - even though sometimes it may hurt to see it - can stay up. It is not a proposal on substance. What is legal and what is illegal is for the member states to decide. The Digital Services Act will provide an obligation to do a horizontal risk assessment on the digital services to determine whether there is a risk they can be misused, for instance, to undermine elections. We have seen examples of that. If so, those risks must be mitigated by the service provider.

Also, in the case of individuals, if something is taken down, they should be told and have the option to complain about it. That, in parallel with the work on the strengthened code of conduct, will get us to a situation where there is room for a national debate on what is legal and what is illegal while we establish processes that enable the conclusions of the offline world to be valleys in the online world.

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