Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 74:

In page 98, between lines 8 and 9, to insert the following: “119. Online political advertising will be prohibited.”.

I promised yesterday during my contribution on amendment No. 32 that I would not repeat it at the same length today. I do not want to fall out with the Minister of State on this issue. Despite all the negotiations I have had with the Department, the contributions made here and during pre-legislative scrutiny and so on, there are a number of questions that have not been answered. First, there has been no satisfactory explanation as to why we are treating different media outlets differently. Radio and TV have a prohibition on political advertising and yet we have made a decision in this Bill to facilitate it for online platforms. There is no explanation or rationale for why we have done that and there should be. Second, we continue to limit the regulation to the period of the election and not outside it. Third, we have heard a lot of discussion from the platforms about how they do not want Ireland to have a different set of regulations from other countries, but despite European directives we still do not have scrutiny or sight of that European legislation.

The best way of protecting our democracy is by not permitting online political advertising, in the same way we do for broadcast media, until we have a comprehensive response. The Minister of State might say this amendment is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Twitter says it does not allow political advertising and the amount of revenue Facebook gets from political advertising is a tiny fraction of the advertising market here in Ireland. Banning political advertising online will not be a significant loss to those platforms but it would help to protect our market. There is much discussion about what happens in online political advertising, and some people think other parties are better at it than others, but the real problem is that we do not know what is going on with a lot of the algorithms and microtargeting. We need to have that level of trust in our democracy. For all those reasons, I ask the Minister of State to consider accepting this very blunt amendment, and to withdraw sections 120, 121 and 122 from the Bill, in order to prohibit the use of online political advertising until the Minister and the commission can bring forward proposals that would satisfactorily regulate the space.