Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with a lot of what the Deputy said. There has been quite a bit of discussion in government on this issue. How do we ensure future elections in Ireland are not being influenced inappropriately, as has clearly been the case in other countries? We certainly cannot rely on the voluntary decisions of large multimedia companies to protect the democracies we have an obligation to protect. The question is what actions Government can take supported by other parties in this House to ensure that elections, be they referenda or other forms of election such as presidential, local, European or general, are not influenced inappropriately by the use of social media with sponsors coming from outside the State. At the same time, how we do allow the use of modern media platforms to allow people to sell a message legitimately and undertake the usual political debate that happens at election time because so many people now get their information from those platforms. That is a difficult balancing act for this House to get right but we all have a vested interest in working on that.

I certainly hope and expect that companies like Facebook and Google will co-operate in the context of transparency, understanding the volumes of advertising funding coming from outside the State and the point of that. That would be helpful in terms of understanding the challenges we need to take on as a legislative body to look at whether we need to introduce new legislation or new policy in this regard. Having spoken to many other foreign Ministers about this issue, I can say that it is an issue that virtually every country in the western world is grappling with to try to protect its electoral system from a rapidly changing media platform that, if not managed, can skew results in a way that is very inappropriate.

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