Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Digital Services Bill supports Ireland's responsibilities to comply with EU Digital Services Act. That has a very high and lofty principle, which is that what is illegal offline will be illegal online also. It seems to be a complex enough Bill and there are a number of significant statutes within it, namely, the appointment of An Coimisiún na Meán as the digital service co-ordinator and lead competent authority for the EU regulation, provision for the supervisory and enforcement powers and, as a backup, the designation of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission as a second competent authority with specific responsibility for online marketplaces under the EU regulation. Beyond that, there are a number of other provisions to do with intermediaries, service provision, trusted flagger status and procedures for dealing with complaints and dispute settlement bodies.

The European Commission states the Digital Services Act is intended to "create a safer digital space in which the fundamental rights of all users of digital services are protected". Those are high principles, but this is going to be very difficult. We on the enterprise committee did some pre-legislative scrutiny on this and one of the first things to be seen was the scope of the remit of this Bill. Ireland is going to have to put in very significant regulatory oversight because some of the largest platforms are here. They have entities incorporated in Ireland and they come under Irish as well as EU law. We are seen as the first moderating authority to try to ensure they are acting as they are supposed to.

When we talk about the digital world, we are talking about a number of different streams of digital activity. There is online information. There is the digital marketplace, which we understand as all types of commerce, exchange and transactions. There is ostensible news and media presentation, though some of it is newsworthy and some of it is not. Then we have social media messaging. This is massive. We know by the number of users worldwide the number of people who are interacting every minute of the day online. This is the space we are now trying to provide regulation in and we must try to do our part in having oversight, controlled by Europe. That is what we are signed up to, but it is going to be very difficult.

When it comes to managing the message, which is ultimately what we are talking about doing here in large part, that is being done at the moment by moderators engaged by the platforms. We have had moderators before the enterprise committee and they are not actually employees of the platforms but are generally subcontractors employed at a remove by the operating platforms. Their job, generally speaking, is to try to take down content that is seen to be malicious, subversive or just too traumatic to view. They are being injured as a result of this. This is one of the reasons they came in to talk to the enterprise committee. Some of them are suffering post-traumatic stress, if you can believe it, from looking constantly at unbelievably harrowing imagery and having to decide whether it should remain up. That is only growing because the amount of content being generated worldwide is also growing.

The ability of social media messaging and the Internet to be used as a communicative and a propaganda tool has been highlighted here already. We have seen in Dublin in recent weeks how people can stoke up a narrative and put graphics to content to make people believe something taking place is nefarious, which it may or may not be, and allow people to take part in it. This is not new as we have known about propaganda since the world wars, but we are now sending it interstellar and this is going to be very difficult to control. I predict, a Cheann Comhairle, that in future you will not be able to read anything on your mobile phone and trust it. You will end up having to go back to the likes of a Reuters or other established news media sites and discounting anything else you see because you cannot trust it. We have seen just recently how the new digital deepfakes have upended elections in other European states. They are coming here as well and last year I think we saw one or two of our significant politicians having their images used in that way. There is, therefore, a really difficult body of work here.

Another area worth highlighting is the issue of negative bias. It is a personality trait human beings have. We are generally more minded, biologically, to notice negative things in our environment than positive. It is probably part of our fight-or-flight or survival instinct. This has been known by the media companies for quite a long time and it is the reason that when a person puts up negative content and positive content, the negative content is generally shared ten times more often than the positive content. We all know that in life, but the problem with it is it also means that if operators of a platform wish to keep a large number of viewers and subscribers, their algorithms must be switched to observe negative bias in posts because that is what circulates. We have people complaining about their mental health and everything else, but I suggest most people turn off their bloody phones and stop reading what is on them. They might feel a lot better. They could go out for a walk for their own sake rather than listening to a lot of this content. We are seeing a lot of it and it is going to become far more commonplace. We can see it even with what is happening in Gaza and Ukraine at the moment. The situations are terrible and it is very important those images are circulated so people know, but there is much disinformation going on there as well.

It is important Ireland does its part in trying to get on top of this really difficult subject. The question here is going to be one of resourcing on the one hand, but the second aspect is going to have to be on regulating all these online platforms. I agree with what Deputies Boyd Barrett and McGuinness said about coming up with a digital tax, because the costs of what we are trying to implement here are going to horrendous. We must do what the EU is rightly doing in coming up with very significant fines for breaches of data law, and that must be implemented in this country, but we will still not be able to get at those who are based overseas and promulgating information from there. It is something we will have to look at. I will be supporting the Bill as it moves through the House.

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