Paul Gogarty (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

I thank Dr. Evans for his presentation. I have a couple of issues and queries relating to Coimisiún na Meán's three key areas for the next year: democracy, the protection of children, and fraud and scams.

On the democracy side, as we know there are a lot of so-called "troll farms" or "troll factories", some of them based in St. Petersburg in Russia, China and various Asian countries. In many cases, these actors are put in place to try to disseminate misinformation in relation to elections or just distrust in public authorities, whether it is related to climate change, free speech, etc. With the advent of AI, how close are we to tools where the IP address of someone making a post can be flagged with an alert to say that the IP address is likely from a troll farm or another suspicious location? A lot of the time, it looks like someone from the USA who is just throwing in his or her tuppence worth of MAGA blah-blah-blah, but that person could be in Russia or somewhere else.

I also have a follow-on query relating to something that was raised in 2022. I do not know whether the directive has been changed in this regard. There were some stoppages of political parties that were engaging troll farms or semi-legitimate troll farms to do a bit of spin online, but it was suggested that PR firms did not have the same level of scrutiny. What is there to stop PR companies employed by political parties from using the dark arts to foment misinformation towards other political parties in an election campaign?

I have a specific query on child safety. I previously asked the Tánaiste to consider bringing in a ban for under-16s similar to what the Australians are working on at the moment. In anticipation of that, has Coimisiún na Meán done any work in terms of looking at what is happening in Australia and looking at the pluses and minuses, including the pitfalls? It will be hard to enforce.

What Australia is trying to do is get to a level where, while it might not keep everyone under 16 years of age out of it, it will keep a lot more under-16s out of it.

I have a specific question about Roblox because it allows communication. A case has been brought to my attention where one child was contacted and made friends with someone outside the European Union. They then created a Discord account for them and started having conversations. It is hard to know if they were a predator but there were some sexually inappropriate commentaries from someone older. It is very easy for someone on Roblox to make these sort of communications with 12- or 13-year-olds, so I wonder how tight Coimisiún na Meán will get in this regard.

As regards spam, trolling and stuff like that, I have reported about 50 incidences on Facebook where someone is talking about a free meet-up, a missing dog or some form of information. When you go into these profiles, you realise the same message has been sent throughout the USA - all around the place - and it is shared on community Facebook pages. Every time you report this as a fake profile, Facebook comes back and states that this does not violate its community standards. Basically, Facebook is right now, every day, facilitating tens of thousands of spam phishing accounts where the article might turn into click bait or is trying to engage someone in scamming and Facebook does absolutely nothing about it. What is the Coimisiún na Meán's role in enforcing tighter scrutiny by Facebook in relation to these type of scams?