Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

I thank the Deputy. He spoke about there being commercial imperatives. Ultimately, non-compliance with the obligations can lead to substantial financial penalties. Moving from self-regulation to statutory regulation changes the incentives. That may take some time to play out. In the timeliness of taking down illegal hate speech - speech that incites violence and hatred against groups with protected characteristics, which is illegal speech - there is an obligation, when flagged, for the flags to be acted on and if it is flagged by a trusted flagger, for it to be prioritised in a timely manner. What is timely will depend on the context. During an election, timing may be quicker than outside of an election period, for example. One of Coimisiún na Meán's roles is as an enforcer of that obligation on social media companies. In the context of very big social media companies, it is a joint competence. The European Commission can take enforcement action, as can we.

The Deputy asked about our engagement with social media companies. As an organisation, we are coming out of our start-up phase but we are still not fully staffed. We established a platform supervision and investigations division. We have supervisors for all of those big platforms and they are building up their supervisory teams. We engage with them in the sense that it is our job to make sure we understand what they do and how they operate. We will start monitoring their compliance and gathering data about their compliance with obligations. If we are concerned that they are not complying, we can start a formal investigation. As I said, we have only had this role for just over a month so it is still early days. On our engagement so far with social media companies, it has been good in the sense that they talk to us. Engagement is not the same as compliance. We will be quite fearless in looking at whether they comply with their obligations inside or outside election periods. I should clarify that within the Digital Services Act, there is a raft of obligations on platforms. There are some specific to the very large platforms such as the risk assessment and mitigation about which I spoke. For those obligations, it is the European Commission's enforcement responsibility. There is a kind of collaboration approach as well. All the digital services co-ordinators will be able to gather evidence about how those services are experienced by people in their states. We, as the particular digital services co-ordinator where most of those platforms are based, have a greater role. Exactly how that will work is something we are still working out because it is so new. Everything the Deputy said about there being a problem is exactly the reason the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act were passed. We are in the first weeks and months of bringing those pieces more to life. The guidelines about which I spoke are the first significant piece of expectation setting by the European Commission. We will see what impact that has on the European elections and whether that needs to be followed by enforcement action. There will be a kind of post-match review afterwards. All of that is important.

There is misinformation. It is as old as the hills for political debate to include contested statements; let us put it like that. Deputy Howlin gave one quote. We will never stop contested statements in political debate, including some that might be deliberately misleading, but social media has made that problem much worse. One is through the amplification of those statements and the other is through enabling what people call co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour. It is not just an individual saying something online or even just a political party; I am sure different political parties will often think their competitors may be-----