Dr. Eileen Culloty:

Access to online platforms’ data has been a major issue for many years. At EU level, a task force was set up with the specific aim of trying to hear from the platforms what their issues were for not providing this information to independent researchers. It came up with a set of guidelines that would be GDPR compliant so there would be no breaches of people’s personal data or anything like that but this still has not manifested. The reason it is a problem is because, as I said in my opening statement, it takes massive resources for people to try to track and follow what is going on online. It is often not even possible. Platforms have much of this information themselves. This is down to things such as if an organisation puts out a fact check or if we were to put out a prebunk and people see it, what do they do afterwards? That is really basic stuff that would be worth knowing and we need data to actually do that. Work is happening at EU level. As the Chair noted, Ireland has all these platforms here. What politicians can do is to keep raising this and how it is not acceptable that democratic states are left trying to figure things out and that civil society and the public are left paying to try to figure things out when that information is there and could be made available.

It is about that co-ordination and the message that needs to keep being hammered back to those companies.