Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

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

General Scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Toby Dagg:

Absolutely. To the commissioner's remarks on this particular question, I will add that what has helped us to limit the volume we might otherwise need to deal with it are the legislative brakes on the volumes. These include the requirement for complainants to have first made a complaint to the social media platform before coming to us. The provisions create sufficiently high thresholds so that we can concentrate our regulatory endeavours and energy on those harms that are manifesting in a way that leave their mark more so than the normal hurly-burly of social media interaction. I will give a snapshot from the cyberbullying scheme. In the first full year of operation, the 2015-16 financial year, we received 186 complaints about child cyberbullying. In the last fully financial year, 2020-21, we received 934. There has been a year-on-year increase of 30% to 35%. Because we have made our processes more efficient and our procedures more responsive, we have been able to absorb this increase with some headroom left for those times when we receive a surge of the sort the commissioner talked about.

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