Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue. This is something that has been on the minds of many people in our country in recent weeks and months, including parents who are worried about their children and individuals who are worried about their reputations.

It is true that social media has been a great innovation. Like all technologies, it comes with positives and negatives. I believe that in many ways social media has changed our lives for the better but it has also changed our lives for the worse. It allows us to connect on a daily basis with people who perhaps in the past we only saw once a week or once a month. It has been helpful in the pandemic, when it is difficult to meet up with people. It allows us to stay connected with people overseas, relatives and friends with whom we would otherwise have lost contact. We are now able to see what they are doing in their daily lives in a way that we could not in the past. It also allows people to organise as residents' associations, political campaigns, groups of workers and groups of businesspeople. That is not a bad thing in itself. It is probably a good thing but it does come with new dangers. Those new dangers include dis-information, misinformation, downright fake news, conspiracy theories and things that would never be published in a normal newspaper or on a television news bulletin. Yet, these things can be distributed online and seen by tens of thousands of people as though they were true with no consequences.

In many ways social media is the public square and should be treated as the public square. The things that people are not allowed to do in a public square should not be allowed on social media either. We know what these are. We are all in favour of free speech. We allow people to speak freely, but there is a limit to that. There are things that people cannot say in the public square, because if they did they could be sued for libel or defamation. The same things apply to a disguise. We allow people to disguise themselves, to dress up, as it were, in the public square, but not if they do it with a view to causing harm to others. That is fundamentally the principle we should apply to social media. If a person is allowed to do something in the public square, then it is okay. If a person is not allowed to do it in the public square, then it is something we need to take action against.

How are we taking action? As Deputy Lowry mentioned, the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, is bringing forward legislation to make imaged-based sexual abuse a criminal offence. This will build on some work done by Deputy Brendan Howlin. The idea is to turn this into a legal protection against people using intimate images to harm or threaten others.

We are also going to bring in legislation to establish an electoral commission. It is long overdue but very much needed. This will allow us to regulate online political content. The third aspect is the legislation being brought forward by the Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Deputy Martin. It relates to an online safety commissioner and giving a new office and role to the media commission. The plan is to give the online safety commissioner the power to order platforms to take down content that they have not taken down where it is harmful.

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