Ms Noelle O'Connell:

Regarding the US and free speech, it is true that one can sue people for almost anything in the US. You can certainly sue them if they defame or libel you. The US is an outlier among democratic countries in its insistence that the individual right to free speech trumps collective responsibilities to others, which is the tradition we have in Europe. The fact that we hear so much about that American understanding is what is destructive to the debate here.

The Cathaoirleach is absolutely right in his characterisation of the platforms being publishers versus platforms. It is instructive to think about where that comes from. In the 1990s, as web technology was developed out of public funding at CERN, it is worth remembering that somebody did not try to make lots of money out of it. Tim Berners-Lee said this should be for the public good. The thinking in the US and Europe was about how we would allow digital business to grow. They came up with their e-commerce directives. One of the things was that these new businesses must be considered platforms like utilities and not as publishers, when they are very clearly publishers now. They are moderating content. The telephone company never moderated what we said on the calls. It is interesting that the EU's Digital Services Act did not attempt to roll that back.

That was fine, since it allowed digital businesses to thrive but how have we ended up in a world where there are just a handful of these businesses and they appear to have taken over the Internet and our communities? It is where you go to find out the results of the under-10 football match, to sell your furniture, to hire a nanny, or whatever. How is this all concentrated on a handful of platforms? It is because competition law has failed to be applied to these companies. It is interesting that the US is really starting to look at competition law, which is supposed to prevent these monopolies from developing in the first place. One way out of this might be if there were alternative companies offering better services that do respect community rights. The free speech issue on platforms is a bit of a misnomer. These are private companies. They can decide what people want to say on them. It is not a town hall or the national parliament, so the companies can decide. If we are annoyed with how things are happening on the Meta or X platforms, why are there not alternatives offering better things? There are not alternatives because competition law allowed them to become so big. This is positive but late, since if competition law was applied, we might not be in the scenario we are in now.

On what to do during election cycles, just yesterday Meta announced that it would have a specific task force for European elections and would maybe look at AI. As we saw in the Slovak elections, disinformation often appears at the last minute, so journalists do not have time to fact-check it. That is good but there will always be questions of who gets to decide or whether Meta acted on time.

A few years ago, before the 2016 election, there was an organisation, the Fair Play Pledge, which asked Irish politicians to commit to not using disinformation and being civil. That might not sound like it is a lot but if we get journalists to commit to not repeating salacious stories just for the sake of it and for getting the clicks, and to correcting false information and publishing reliable information and if politicians commit to civil debate and not to indulge in this stuff, we could maybe collectively restore some kind of order. Then, when a false claim emerges, if there is consistency across journalists, politicians and others saying it is false, that would go some way towards taking back control of our own democracy and society, rather than expecting platforms to come and do these things for us.