Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

As the Australian law comes into effect today, we are at a consequential time for the right of national governments to set digital policy. Whether that law succeeds remains to be seen, but we are at a critical junction right now where states, and in Ireland's case states along with the EU, must set policy in the national interest. Protecting children from hate and exploitation is a really good place to start and I support efforts to do so. However, a blanket ban in the long term may be hard to maintain. It is a blunt instrument and it is permeable. Most importantly, it by no means captures the range of action that is urgently needed in respect of the absolute free-for-all of hatred, violence and extreme speech that pervades some platforms totally unchecked.

The digital space should be truly open, a free exchange of ideas, of information and of commerce where the individual is protected. Today, however, that entire business model is based on the sale and resale of personal data and the sophisticated algorithms that are hyper-targeted. They target the individual to drive up interaction, drive up attention and drive up sales. Surely, we now see that this has poisoned discourse in our democracy. It has become a doom-loop of prioritising the most extreme and most fringe views that are completely unmoored from fact, from reason and from any sense of perspective. Today, the people who profit from this system have become the most powerful people in the world. They openly work to undermine our democratic foundations and their sales racket has been used by demagogues and charlatans to capture an entire political process.

It is easy to despair but I do not think we have the luxury of ignoring this any more. As a small EU state with significant big tech companies here, we should be taking a lead role in doing everything we can at European Council level to make sure that the digital world respects individual rights and is truly free from mass subversion. This starts at home and the step that I have continually called for: we should give Coimisiún na Meán the power to require all platforms to ensure that those recommender algorithms are set to a default "off" setting.

I recognise that the Government is taking what it sees as the best step to protect children. I am happy to engage with this proposal as it goes forward but that will not work unless people are protected. It is important that, as well as advancing this proposal, the Government should look to take those wider steps focusing on the algorithms and should commit today to doing so.

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