Mr. Mark Malone:

Ireland can say it is going to do this. If we did, it would probably be sought to be given effect on a European-wide basis under the Digital Services Act. We must look at how the dance of regulation has happened. When Facebook set up originally, it spent ten years stating it was opposed to regulation. Increasingly, as the harm was coming out, it stated that we should have regulation at the level of nation states and set it up for everybody to do, which was never going to work. There was never common agreement and regulators were always running behind. The Digital Services Act was one of the first pieces of legislation at a European level to try to put some shape on that in the context.

In terms of the specifics and the question as to whether individuals are able to turn off the recommendation system, the answer is that no, they cannot. What Ms McDonald was talking about is that a part of the recommender system involves processing sensitive data about a person, which is a GDPR issue. Social media companies are doing that at a mass scale, which is a big GDPR issue. In recent months, committee members will probably have probably noticed they have to tick new boxes to keep using the services of those companies. That is about them trying to get in front of the imposition of the Digital Services Act but also-----