Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 20 March 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Union Affairs
European Elections 2024, Voting Rights and Combating Disinformation: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:
It was around lunchtime on the day. The platforms confirmed to us that they mostly had incident response teams and had set them up. Following what happened that evening and that night, we decided we wanted to understand more about what the platforms had done and we invited the European Commission to join those meetings. This has sometimes been reported as the activation of a formal mechanism under the DSA. It was not quite as formal as that. We invited the European Commission because there will be the need to design a formal mechanism and we thought it would be useful for the European Commission to be involved. It was very happy to be involved. It had quite a good impact on the platforms to have the European Commission involved in those calls as well as ourselves. Through that we got more insight into what the platforms had done and got them to escalate this to suitable senior people within the platforms. It was a question of understanding what they had done. We were very clear that although the engagement by the platforms had been good, that was not the same as compliance. At that stage the European Commission was the only organisation with enforcement powers, so it would be up to it to decide whether there was any breach of DSA obligations as a result. It was in a way a good piece of collaboration. It was not formal but it has laid the groundwork for how we might collaborate in future. Would Ms Comey like to add something?
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