Dr. John Evans:

I thank the committee for the invitation to meet it. Since the establishment of Coimisiún na Meán in March 2023, we have been focused on the development and implementation of a robust online safety regime for Ireland. The result of these efforts - our online safety framework - is now fully in place and there are now binding rules for platforms to keep people safe online.

The framework is composed of three pieces of legislation, namely, the Digital Services Act, which I am mainly here to talk about today, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act and the terrorist content online regulation.

The Digital Services Act is a crucial element of the framework. It has rebalanced the relationship between users of online services and the online platforms themselves. Under the DSA, users have new rights, including a right to accessible and user-friendly ways of reporting illegal content, and platforms have new responsibilities to make it easier for users to report illegal content, to respond to these reports and to have terms and conditions that they enforce.

As Ireland’s digital services co-ordinator, an coimisiún has a central role to play in the enforcement of the DSA for Ireland and Europe, as many of the largest online platforms are established here. Coimisiún na Meán was one of only a small number of digital services co-ordinators established on day 1 of the DSA in February 2024 and we have been working tirelessly on the supervision of online platforms since then. Our approach is supervision led and risk based, and among our strategic priorities are the protection of children, democracy, fraud and scams, hate and public safety. We take complaints from members of the public via our contact centre, which has processed 2,800 contacts since February 2024, with 30% of those relating to digital services. We also handle complaints from other EU member states and work closely with the European Commission and other digital services co-ordinators across the EU.

As an organisation, an coimisiún currently employs almost 250 staff members, having grown from just 40 only two and a half years ago. Approximately 100 staff work on online safety in key areas, such as platform supervision, investigations, regulatory operations, user complaints and user experience, policy and research. We have rapidly scaled up our platform supervision teams, who have identified and engaged with over 150 services in 2025, including 15 very large online platforms and over 130 intermediate service providers of other kinds.

Through our regulatory collaboration with the European Commission and the other digital service co-ordinators across the EU, we have informed the development of the DSA Article 28 guidelines for the protection of children, the code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech and a co-ordinated regulatory action on below-threshold pornography platforms to ensure that children here and across Europe cannot access pornography. We are also assisting the European Commission with two investigations under the Digital Services Act. Through this work, we have been able to strengthen our relationships with the Commission, deepen our understanding of platform behaviours and use the outputs of these investigations to inform future enforcement action.

We also want to empower young people, as well as their parents and teachers, with knowledge on how they can protect themselves online. We have developed educational resources, issued to every post-primary school in Ireland, on the rights of users online. These resources include lesson plans for junior and senior cycle students, and videos, infographics and posters. Later this year, we will run a further campaign on online safety in conjunction with the Department of Health.

For the rest of 2025 and into 2026, we will continue to prioritise three key areas, namely, democracy, the protection of children, and fraud and scams. Our experience of the local, European and general elections last year means we are well prepared in advance of the upcoming presidential election. In the coming weeks, we will be bringing online platforms in to meet with us, the European Commission and other stakeholders to assess their readiness for dealing with election-related issues, such as the protection of civic discourse and electoral integrity. Those are our priorities.

We will also continue to prioritise the protection of children online. Under our online safety code, platforms that allow pornography or gratuitous violence must use effective age assurance to ensure that children are not normally able to access this kind of content. Platforms are also required to have parental controls in place. The code has been fully in force since July and we know that platforms have begun to make changes to meet these new requirements. We are currently reviewing all of the designated video-sharing platforms to assess their compliance with the code and will take further supervisory, investigative or enforcement action as required.

We also recognise that financial scams and fraud are a concern to the Irish public and this year, we granted trusted flagger status to the Central Bank of Ireland, which means that online platforms that receive reports about financial scams and frauds from the Central Bank must treat those reports with priority. The work of the Central Bank of Ireland in this area will also feed into Coimisiún na Meán’s identification of trends in financial scams online and will be instrumental in establishing an informed, evidence-based approach to our ongoing supervision activities.

The past few years have been busy for Coimisiún na Meán. We have established ourselves. We grow to meet our expanded regulatory remit and implement the online safety framework for the benefit of people in Ireland and across the EU.

We have begun to see some behavioural changes from the platforms that we regulate, but we are not complacent about the risks that people still face online.

As we continue to supervise the online safety framework, I reassure all users of online services, whether parents, children or indeed elected representatives, of three important points. The days of platform self-regulation are over. Coimisiún na Meán is here to ensure that platforms meet their regulatory obligations, and to ensure that everyone, especially children, can have a safer online experience. If the platforms do not comply, we will have no hesitation in launching enforcement action and investigations, which may result in fines that can run to hundreds of millions of euro for the largest platforms.

We also want people to know that they have new rights online, which we would encourage them to use. Where they see illegal content online, or content they think might break the terms and conditions of an online platform, then they should report it to the platform where they saw it. If they cannot find the report function, or if the platform does not respond to their report, they should contact Coimisiún na Meán. These reports are crucial for us in building a case for regulatory intervention and in holding the platforms to account. We are currently finalising a review on Article 16 of the DSA - a priority area concerning the ability of users to report illegal content. We expect to make decisions on next steps in the coming weeks.

I again thank the members for their invitation to meet today and for the support that elected representatives have provided to Coimisiún na Meán in recent years. I know that they share our goal of keeping everyone, especially children, safe online. My colleagues and I are happy to answer any questions they may have.