Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will focus on a couple of little issues in my contribution. The first is to take up some of the comments Dr. Culloty just made because I have a slight difference of opinion with her. The US model of free speech is not absolutist by any means. Just in the last month, we have seen that former President Trump had severe damages imposed on him for comments he made that were deemed by a court not to be acceptable. Therefore, even though he has a right to free speech, like all US citizens, he will have to pay out - and I am sure he will challenge it - substantial damages before libelling someone. The problem, as I see it, and I could be slightly wrong, relates to when social media - the Internet more so than social media - was being established in the United States. People harp on about free speech going back to constitutional times. The reality is that Congress legislated to change the platform's liability from being that of a publisher to being that of a conduit, which effectively was the same viewpoint that AT&T or something like that would have. Everyone had the right to use the platform and, therefore, it should not be moderated and there was no liability to the organisation for the content on the platform. That really is at the heart of it. The European Union has moved to co-regulation, as Dr. Culloty said, but I am a firm believer - and this is absolutely no attempt to suppress free speech - that if the same liabilities and penalties that attach to traditional publishers were to attach to the operations of social media companies in the European Union, first, and then in the United States, there would be a sea change in what we see. While people have a right to have a voice, we cannot believe that there is no damage to somebody having a voice and effectively facilitating extremism, which is what one is doing. That is very dangerous. It undermines democracy at its core. We will look back in decades to come at what is happening now and be amazed by the willingness of democracies to accept it. The irony of ironies is that we accept it because we are a democracy. In China and certain other countries, the control level is great, and the platforms are still there but they are controlled. Nobody wants that because that is a totalitarian dictatorship, but it proves one thing, that is, that technologically, there is the ability for platforms to regulate content.

A choice is being made. I sat on a justice committee in 2017. The platforms were quite willing and open to pointing out that they make a cost-benefit analysis. I totally agree with the point about not trusting them to be the provider of information because it is a cost-benefit analysis to determine how much is spent on content moderation. Those are some of the overall points. At the heart of this is Dr. Culloty's comment on the "deplorables" that Hillary Clinton made, which is that if you actually believe something is fair and balanced, it is usually because it is only plus or minus 5% of your own viewpoint. If it is within those confines, you think that is great and that it is a fair and balanced source. There are many people in the United States who refer to Donald Trump in a particular way but the real issue with fact or non-fact is that 85% to 90% of people who indicate that they will vote for Donald Trump in the next election believe he won the last election. They used to say you can have your opinions but not your own facts. The reality is now that we have reached a world where people have their own facts. Whole sections of society have their own facts.

The aspect of the question I wanted to put to Ms O'Connell is something we discussed last week and I am interested in her take on it again. It is still at the heart of this. From the point of view of European elections or any other elections, though we are facing into the European elections, how do we, in a fast-moving age, try to combat information that appears during a cycle that is effectively three to four weeks long but is dealt with by bureaucracy, legislation and systems that require months, if not years, to respond? The reality of it is that the case I was referring to in the United States is going before the court for an adjudication today, in 2024, for an incident that happened effectively four years ago. People will argue that the damage is done. Are there, in Ms O'Connell's view, systems or processes that could be looked at or that could be imposed on social media platforms that would be much more immediate? How would we go about implementing something along those lines?