Ms Celene Craig:

I thank the Chair for the questions. In regard to the suite of regulatory tools, we set out quite a bit of detail in our original submission to Government in early 2019 as part of the Government's consultation around the formation of the media commission and the potential for online regulation.

I am delighted to say many of those recommendations have been taken up and are evident in the legislation, as currently drafted. I am pleased to note there is quite a wide range of regulatory functions and powers, in particular relating to online regulation. I would highlight, in particular, the power of the media commission to draw up its own codes. It will have very extensive investigative and auditing powers, which we would have recommended. We also made a strong recommendation that platforms be required to supply information to the media commission in a format to be designated by the commission. All that is very much embodied in the legislation. There is also an element of being able to future-proof some aspects of the regulation through, for example, the potential to extend the range of harms within its scope. All in all, we believe it is a very solid item of legislation, as currently drafted. It comprises a useful set of regulatory tools that will be available to support the commission’s work when it gets up and running.

As regards disinformation and misinformation, the BAI has been very active in this area, not least through our work at a European level. We are the Irish nominated body to the European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services. We have played a very active role in dealing with disinformation and misinformation, which is a key concern of the commission. It is not covered in the legislation but I referred to the Digital Services Act coming down the path. The European Commission has high hopes it will certainly deliver better outcomes in terms of misinformation and disinformation. A voluntary code of practice has been compiled by a range of interests, including many of the platforms based in Ireland, but the voluntary nature of that code has not made it particularly successful. The BAI has undertaken a number of reports both regarding the European elections and disinformation in the context of Covid. Those three reports, which we have published and are available on our website, contain an extensive range of recommendations on how to deal with disinformation into the future. We are delighted to say the European Commission has strongly endorsed the Irish report's recommendations and has fed those into its recommendations, which are going through and will be worked through the European Commission’s proposals in this regard. We have a big concern about that issue. In terms of the sustainability of indigenous media and our traditional public service content providers, it rubber-stamps and reinforces our belief that there is a need to ensure their sustainability as a key mechanism for ensuring balanced and impartial democratic discourse, particularly against the wider backdrop of the extent of disinformation that can be available online. In general, we share the committee’s concerns. It is an issue that needs to be addressed but perhaps the Digital Services Act, and we will have to wait a few more months to see how it shapes up in its end form, may well deliver some solutions and means of addressing disinformation in the online space into the future.