Ms Niamh McDonald:

I thank the Deputy. The recommender system is automatically switched on by default. I will go back a couple of steps. Ireland is now going to be the hub of the European Digital Services Act. We are the hub of that because we have the headquarters of all the social media companies, as I said, less than 2 km down the road. That is under the remit of the media committee. As I said, recommender systems are turned on by default. That system identifies all your sensitive data. It knows if you are a man, your age, where you live, your political preferences and all that kind of stuff. Social media companies can use that data, which are covered under the general data protection regulation, GDPR, legislation, to direct particular salacious and violent disinformation content to land into your feed. We are talking about the amplification of that information. The recommender system is turned on by default. The way I describe it is that a user is brought into a river of hate. People are in that river of hate because they are constantly in that algorithm. If you are looking at advertisements or whatever else, you can become stuck, in that the same advertisements come on. What we are saying is that the river of hate lands into people's feeds. A lot of the time, people are searching for it and the harm is already done. Social media companies are currently saying they will take it down once it is reported. As the Deputy rightly said, that stuff is never taken down and when posts containing disinformation are put up, the harm is already done. We are asking for the recommender system to be turned off by default, which means we can shut down the dam and the river is not coming in.

We now have the new media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán. Ms Niamh Hodnett, who oversees social media, has proposed in her first proposal that the recommender system is turned off by default. It is the first time internationally this has happened. We in Ireland have a massive opportunity to take the global lead on the regulation of social media platforms in a way that has never happened before. Up to now, those platforms have escaped regulation internationally.