Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

This is obviously important legislation for many reasons given the huge importance and influence of digital services and social media, and just how much our lives now are caught up with the digital world, information technology, online economic activity and all of that stuff. Particularly important in our thinking on this are the recent horrible events where a small group of malign far-right actors sought to exploit in the most horrible way a terrible incident for their own political purposes and the consequences were pretty terrible to put it mildly. That has highlighted in the public mind the importance of looking at these things.

Obviously, there is a balance that we have to get right because we want freedom of expression, we want open and robust political debate, we want the right to disagree with each other to put forward controversial views and to put forward dissenting and minority views that sometimes may not be terribly popular. We need to defend that too. At the same time, we need to prevent people inciting hatred and violence or peddling dangerous misinformation. That is a tough balance to get right and the potential for abuse of significant powers being given to regulatory authorities is something we need to think about.

For example, I would not trust Vladimir Putin with regulating digital online activity. I would not trust the Israeli Government with regulating online activity. In fact, it is very busy trying to suppress what I and many people might consider very valid and legitimate criticism and outrage at what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza at the moment. It has moved very significantly to prevent digital communication in Gaza and to prevent journalists and people in Gaza actually conveying the true horror of the situation. It is trying to suggest that anyone who in any way questions the massacre, as I would see it, that Israel is conducting in Gaza, is somehow an apologist for terrorism, for example. Would one trust the Israeli government with regulating online communication? I certainly would not. I would be very concerned that it would actually use it simply to censor all views that did not suit its narrative or did not legitimise its horrors.

On the one hand we want to prevent online incitement, dangerous or blatant misinformation or fraud that may occur online but on the other hand, we cannot always trust authorities to use the power they might have to regulate those things in a genuinely fair and objective way. That is a difficult balance to get right.

I want to say one thing that is related to the Bill. Given that much of the power in these areas is now controlled by a relatively small number of private very wealthy entities who control the online world - whether it's Mr. Musk or a small number of other super wealthy individuals who now control many of these online and social media platforms - one way of trying to balance things, which is long overdue, is to impose digital taxes on these companies that are making absolutely extraordinary profits. Why is that important? How does that help in what we are trying to do here?

This relates to the big debate we had about RTÉ. Whatever difficulties we may rightly have with the governance issues that emerged in RTÉ, the big difference with a public service broadcaster is that at some level it is accountable to us. Theoretically at least, it is accountable to us and we can influence how it gets the balance right about information. Considering its funding problems, if we did not try to assist in maintaining the public service broadcaster - I think we it is imperative that we do - then the information sources that would be available would be essentially reduced down to these social media companies and a few media barons, the Rupert Murdochs and the Elon Musks of this world. I would not trust them as far as I could throw them with giving fair and balanced information or with regulating online communication in a fair way. Mr. Musk nailed his colours to the mast and they certainly would not be views that I or I suspect many people would share.

The idea that these people control the flow of information for millions or possibly billions of people or regulate what is dangerous, what is incitement or what is true, that is a real problem, whereas with public service broadcasting at least there is some level of accountability. The financial problems RTÉ has are to a fair degree related to the growth of these private social media corporations, digital information, digital news and so on. The two things, RTÉ's financial problems and the growth of this area, are connected.

One way to balance it as a matter of urgency is to impose digital taxes in order to fund public service broadcasting albeit a public service broadcasting that may need reform. However, as an aside, I do not see how that reform should take the form of slashing the volume or quality of content as may well happen or slashing jobs because then the consumer of public service broadcasting is losing and the workers who did nothing wrong are losing. There must be real fears that that is what is going on when we hear about different areas of public service broadcasting being significantly reduced. It seems the public and the workforce are being punished for the wrongs of people at the top. Ironically enough, much of the wrongs they were doing related to the fact that they were trying to be like digital services area, the private sector.

Part of what needs to happen to balance out the dangers of what can happen on social media is to ensure that we continue to have the resources available to ensure that there are reliable sources of public service information online, on television, on radio, in print and so on.

It would be a tragedy if our only sources of information, digital or otherwise, were to become monopolised by a small group of wealthy individuals who time and time again show they have a very definite agenda. That is usually quite a self-serving agenda. Very often - in fact invariably - this is a partisan agenda. They have certain ideas of what is legitimate information, but that may not tally at all with any reasonable idea of what is actually objective and balanced, or with views that are shared by the majority of people, or with views that are simply scientifically and empirically valid. Let us be honest; we are almost getting into the area of philosophy in terms of how we assess what is empirically true or genuinely balanced. It is therefore a tricky area.

The regulatory bodies that are being discussed in this Bill must be genuinely accessible to the public. They must have the resources that are necessary to be genuinely responsive to the public. I am not by any means an expert, but I have learned about content moderators. I did not even know this group of people existed until some of them contacted me. It was interesting to hear their accounts of their job and the way they are treated. They work for some of these fantastically wealthy corporations where they moderate content and look at some of the most shocking and awful content. They have to moderate it in order to filter out the really sick, dangerous and horrible stuff. They have to engage with it and make decisions about it according to all sorts of criteria. This relates to how they judge whether some content should not be seen. Although they are employed by very profitable companies, and we often imagine all the employees there are being paid very well, a lot of this work is being outsourced to people who suffer awful conditions, are being treated very badly and are not particularly well paid. They have to deal with content and some of them even report they have post-traumatic stress from it because it is so awful. This is an area we need to think about. The workers who have to deal with this content and moderate it need our support, so they can deal with it. They must be treated properly.

That is a slight aside, but critically, I refer to the statutory bodies or agencies. I understand this will be the first or second line in the Bill. They need to be properly resourced so they are genuinely responsive to public concerns and genuinely fair and balanced. We need a constant, ongoing review of how they adjudicate these things so that on the one hand they are doing their job, but on the other hand they are not infringing on important rights, such as freedom of speech, the right to dissent and the right to have different views. It is a matter of getting that balance right. That is always going to be a controversial area.

Sometimes it is the case that the contrarians who are in the minority turn out to be very important people. There can be a majority consensus where everybody is so certain that they are right about certain things. Then, it turns out down the line that the majority consensus was a load of nonsense and misinformation. Let us think about some of the economic orthodoxies that dominated the advice that was given to people in the run-up to the Celtic tiger collapse. It turned out that much of it was total misinformation about what was happening in the financial world. This was being peddled by very respectable sources. I am saying this is a sensitive area and there is always the danger of abuse. It must be subject to considerable oversight and constant review from the bodies that are there to regulate and be fair to those who are trying to post legitimate content. It must weed out the true poison, the genuine incitement to violence, etc.

I will raise another important issue. I do not know how one deals with this, but we need to think about it. I am referring to the ability of people to hide behind online personas. We cannot track these people down when they are inciting horrible stuff, are doing horrible stuff online or are engaged in vile or dangerous things. We must be able to track those people down so we know who they are. We must look at that area, because it seems as though all sorts of people can hide behind multiple fictional identities to spread forms of propaganda, lies, misleading information or content that is vile, inciting, racist, etc.

It is a sensitive area. It is an important area and we have to get to the bottom of it. We need to make sure that the regulatory bodies operate in a transparent way, that they are genuinely open and accessible, that they are subject to review and oversight and that we get reports that detail what they are doing and what sort of issues are coming up. These must be properly scrutinised by Oireachtas committees and open to the public to review and question.

I am not sure if this Bill is the place for this, but I will go back to the point I made at the start. There is the question of how these companies are making staggering profits. They are incredibly powerful now. They are far too powerful as far as I am concerned. In my socialist world, I would nationalise the lot of them, because I think they are too powerful and the money they are making is extreme. In the absence of that, let us at least impose a digital tax on their profits and put the receipts into public service broadcasting - I am referring to a proper, reformed, decent public service broadcaster - and into other areas of culture and the arts which are massively underfunded. I do not want to be critical of people who, as we all do, sit and look at their phones. There is an addiction to the phone. You are looking at this, that and the other. Would we not all like it if more people were to go to plays, concerts and other forms of social interaction outside of social media? We should have the resources to make those things available and accessible to people so they do not have to rely on their phones for entertainment and information. We also need to think about that. Let us be honest: many of us think this is a plague on our lives. It is consuming our lives. You cannot do anything about that, but you can resource more healthy forms of human interaction and sources of information. You can make those things more accessible and put the funding resources into them. A lot of money could be made available for that if we were to impose a digital services tax on these big streaming companies and digital and IT companies.

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