Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

I will describe our role regarding electoral disinformation and how that works. As Dr. Evans has said, the current code of practice on disinformation is still a voluntary code of practice. We played a very substantial role in monitoring adherence with the old code of practice and also with the new strengthened code of practice that was adopted last year. The Digital Services Act, DSA, will bring in the obligation to manage risks, and the failure of a large platform to sign up to the voluntary code of practice, which is likely to be made onto a co-regulatory basis, or if a platform does not abide it by that, then it will have a hard time showing that it is doing enough to deal with disinformation.

On the question about elections, as the Senator said it is not just our elections or the European Union elections in particular, it is all over the world. We have had engagement with our counterparts overseas. In the voluntary code of practice I believe that one of the issues is to have a kind of emergency response mechanism, and especially for disinformation at times of crises or at times of elections. We will want to participate in that. With regard to disinformation in particular we ourselves will not have very specific hard powers. We have met with the Electoral Commission and we will be in touch with it. It may have some powers also in relation to this although they are not yet commenced.

On the Senator's point about what attitude the platforms will have and if will they respond, when one is a regulator one always sees a spectrum of attitudes from the regulated entities ranging from people who really try their best to comply, through to people who would comply but do not really understand how to, through to people who have no interest in complying. The tools the regulator uses are a bit different depending on where people are on that spectrum. For the people who have no interest in complying then one must move much faster towards using the formal enforcement tools. The Oireachtas has given to us very substantial tools to be able to search people's premises, to be able to require information, and ultimately being able to impose fines of 6% of turnover under the Digital Services Act, and 10% under the online safety code. One way or another we will get their attention.