Professor Barry O'Sullivan:

An AI system that a 15-year-old could implement, if it could be deployed by Mr. Elon M, could easily address that problem. These are not technologically difficult problems. There is just no willingness to do it. We need to push for simple solutions, such as sorting out trolling. I think the world would want us to do that.

The Senator is correct to say there is a new sort of capitalism now. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism, which is a great term. One step Ireland could take, which would have an international reach, is to identify a small number of topics where we want to have global agreement. We are not going to get a treaty or a law but there could be a form of peer pressure. In my experience of working with the social media companies at the European Commission through the high-level expert group, the first thing that surprised me was that a lot of these technological companies really want regulation, because they do not want to be caught on the wrong side of a line they do not know they have crossed until the public has told them they have crossed it. They want politicians to tell them where the line is in order that they can stand up against it, and then it will be politicians' responsibility because they drew the line. They are very sensitive to peer pressure, and we could identify a small number of topics, such as the outsourcing of self-esteem, trolling and other low-hanging fruit, although I am not saying the self-esteem issue is low-hanging fruit, on which we could get international agreement. Perhaps there could be some sort of charter or code of conduct that we would expect these companies to sign up to. If they signed up to that, good old-fashioned shame and peer pressure might have a considerable impact. These companies are very sensitive to that these days.