James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome Mr. Kaplan and Ms Sweeney from Facebook and thank them for joining us today. As this is the first hearing of the scrutiny of my Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017, I shall briefly outline the legislation for the benefit of committee members and all interested parties before moving on to the Facebook engagement.

The Irish Electoral Acts were written largely in 1992 and have seen little update since. All of that happened before the existence of the Internet, broadband and certainly before social media. As such, the Acts do not cover online space at all.

The Broadcasting Act is an anomaly in the sense that political advertising on television and radio is completely prohibited. We have governance on paper, materials, election posters and a complete ban on television and radio advertisements yet a total vacuum exists in the online regulatory space. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, BAI, has said that online advertising and social media advertising is out of scope. The Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, has said that it does not have a role under the current legislation. The Data Protection Commissioner has an interest in personal data but not in political online campaigning. Also, the Referendum Commission of Ireland, for the forthcoming referendum, has said that online campaigning is out of scope for it as well. We have a situation where the Internet remains like the Wild West electorally.

The reason the funding of campaigns has always been regulated is because of the fundamental principle that democracy should not be available to the highest bidder. We have expenditure limits, campaign monitoring, the governance of fundraising and a ban on television advertising. All of that subscribes to the basic principle that there should be a level playing field as much as possible and that anybody can compete in politics at the entry level. Again, none of this applies online.

As we have seen in recent elections that have taken place around the world, such as in the US, the Brexit referendum and in many other jurisdictions, and specifically Cambridge Analytica, it has been possible to enter the online domain, spend an awful lot of money and disproportionately affect the outcome of elections using very sophisticated techniques. It is important that we move to manage that gap in Ireland. I introduced First Stage of my Bill in the Dáil and it passed Second Stage before Christmas. My Bill seeks to do a number of things to regulate the sector. My Bill embraces online advertising and views it as a good thing. My Bill sees political online advertisements as democratising to some extent. There is a low barrier to entry. My Bill seeks to put transparency front and centre of any political advertising. It requires a transparency notice, which means the advertiser must state who they are, identify the publisher, identify the sponsor and whether a targeting algorithm has been applied. There is a ban on bots. Where multiple fake accounts artificially promote a particular viewpoint, bots can bombard somebody to make something appear unpopular or conversely multiply something to make it appear very popular. Bots skew online discourse, which has a negative impact on democracy.

When I was preparing my Bill I engaged with many civic society groups, including the National Union of Journalists, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Amnesty International, Uplift and the Transparent Referendum Initiative. All of the organisations broadly support my Bill and its measures. They view the measures in my legislation as very important..

I thank Facebook, with which I engaged at the outset last year on this legislation. I have found it to be fair, co-operative, collaborative and very keen to see the legislative measures implemented. Twitter, Google and the other social media platforms have also been involved.

The Bill is needed. There is a broad consensus among the technical sphere and the civic society sphere that my legislation is needed. Unfortunately, the Government remains ambiguous about the legislation. I hope it will come around and I think it will. The parliamentary legal advice has deemed the Bill to be relatively solid and some amendments will be tidied up. The view from civic society and elsewhere is that the legislation is needed. We just need to get on with the process. Today is our first engagement and I look forward to the session ahead. I know that the Clerk to the Committee will arrange further engagements with other witnesses over the next number of weeks and months. It is a matter of when the Bill becomes law.

Again, I welcome the delegation from Facebook and I look forward to the engagement.