Ms Celene Craig:

If I may, I will respond to the Senator's question on the role that the media commission might have in this regard. Insofar as the matters that are within scope of the media commission are concerned, there is potential for it to have oversight of the way in which machine learning informs decisions in regard to the taking down of content online. A compliance and enforcement regime is to be introduced by the media commission for services falling within the scope of legislation. An important part of that is not just looking at content that is on the platform that should have been taken down but also ensuring, in the interests of freedom of expression, that regulation is not having an over-chilling effect. It will also be important for the media commission to have auditing powers to examine that type of content. Subject to the GDPR requirements, the media commission should have access to content that has been removed by algorithmic processes to ensure that it is in compliance and that the right types of decisions have been made. The BAI would envisage that this would form part of the compliance and enforcement regime that would be introduced by the media commission. It is important to clarify that.

On the range and experience of staffing, my colleague, Michael O'Keeffe, has already referred fairly extensively to the work of the BAI in this area, both in preparing for the new regime and for implementation of the audiovisual media services, AVMS, directive. I believe there is a core of staff in the BAI that is well positioned to assist the media commission in that start-up situation. In terms of the efforts of the Department in securing the right numbers, our departmental colleagues have said that a staff of, at least, the size of the Data Protection Commission would be envisaged. Given the scale of the tasks before the new media commission, we would not disagree with that. We believe that a staff of, at least, a similar scale is required. There will be a requirement to build incrementally and a wide range of skills will be required. Given that regulation, for example, of the AVMS directive will be on a Europe-wide basis, a range of people with extensive legal and regulatory expertise and others with linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the online environment will be required.