Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There is unfinished business following the recent referendum to repeal the eighth amendment. Obviously, we have all of the legislation required, but there is one other aspect about which I want to ask. We are still in the middle of a real crisis in terms of the effect of online advertising in elections and referendum campaigns across the world. Only yesterday we saw controversy in the United Kingdom where the Leave campaign may have exceeded the spending limits, mainly for online advertising. In America the Cambridge Analytica findings are still washing out in terms of what happened during the presidential election. In our own country during the referendum campaign we were very lucky to have the Transparent Referendum Initiative which was able to show what adverts were being posted, but it was impossible to know what the actual volume was or the amount of money behind them. Facebook and then Google, with only a few weeks to go to polling day, stopped all advertising.

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