Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome and all the more so because she is bringing forward one of the most far-reaching and significant pieces of legislation ever seen in these Houses. It is much needed for the regulation of media in this modern age. As a member of the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media, I was delighted over the last year to have been working on that pre-legislative scrutiny of the general scheme of the Bill, along with my colleagues, Senator Malcolm Byrne, and the Chair, Deputy Niamh Smyth. We addressed the dozens of witnesses from many spheres of society that came before us, from media experts, to health experts, to young students who had been subjected to vile sexual abuse and sexual exploitation online.

Now, we have a Bill to deal with the robust regulatory framework. That is so welcome and I commend the Minister. We now see the benefits of having a Minister with responsibility for the media, as well as of having a Department with responsibility for the media, in bringing forward legislation that is required. However, here is the rub, which is bit like when Governments in the past took on the big, vested interests in the world, such as the tobacco industry. We are facing, just like we did with tobacco in the past, tech giants which make profits that would make one's eyes water. Facebook’s profits are €40 billion. The ball is very much in these companies' court. They are looking at this Bill very carefully, as we have seen from their appearance before us at the media committee. The warnings by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, at the weekend, when she spoke on RTÉ, were that the world is depending on Ireland for a level of robustness that keeps people safe. This is stark.

Equally stark is her warning about what an online safety commissioner will need in terms of staff and expertise. She said that it would need at least 20 algorithm experts with deep product expertise, who understand how small choices make parts of the system interact with each other. If we do not have these experts, then we do not have a chance of holding these systems accountable. Here is the problem. Remember that there is no undergraduate course from which we can obtain these experts. They exist and are trained only by the very tech giants that we are seeking to regulate. In effect, we will have to break into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and steal a couple of Oompa Loompas so that we can get the magic formula and take these guys on at their own game. If we do not, we will get outflanked at every turn. Just like Augustus Gloop, we will be stuck in the pipe, only ours will be a huge, high-speed fibre cable one.

I am very positive about this Bill. More so, I have been heartened by all those who came before us and spoke to us at the committee. Not all of the voices were those that predicted doom and gloom. Many young people and students spoke to us about the dangers of over-regulation. They said that a process of education and support is needed in our education system. They nearly half-scolded us. They said that teachers and parents need to understand the world as it is, as opposed to the world in which we grew up. This should not be an over-regulated world.

We also had students before the committee. One in particular case, Alicia O’Sullivan, the law student from UCC, had her image used on a fake Instagram account. Several of the posts were nude images of girls, without their faces visible. The account’s creators falsely purported that these images were of Alicia. One of the most frustrating things was her interaction with An Garda Síochána when she reported it. Gardaí were kind of looking at her as if to say, “What are you doing here?” and they were asking her about what kinds of images she posted herself. They did not have the expertise. They were not trained in this whole area and sphere to be able to deal with her complaint properly. Hence the need for the individual complaints mechanism in the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill, so that we have a proper area whereby complaints can be dealt with.

On the issue of health - and this is such a broad-ranging Bill - we had the Irish Heart Foundation before the committee. Its representatives described as worrying the absence of a ban on junk food advertisements aimed at children. Professor Conor O’Mahony, the special rapporteur on child protection, spoke of the dangers of targeted gambling advertisements, which is quite frankly one of the biggest threats in our society today. They are one of the biggest advertisers in the online world. Trust me, they have their own batch of Oompa Loompas working in the back offices who are targeting susceptible people and are creating case files on their big clients and big gamblers so that they can keep them hooked. These people have unlimited resources to make sure that they are using the online world for financial gain.

We met with Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram at our hearings. They were terse exchanges. They did not come skipping to the table to meet us. We subsequently met with representatives from Facebook privately online to discuss community standards. We came away even more despairing after that, given our differences in interpretation of what was regarded as acceptable content, versus what was not. Hence, it reinforced my backing for, and my belief in, the need for regulation, as well as for a complaints mechanism. Only 3% to 5% of hate speech on Facebook is picked up through its artificial intelligence filters, and only 1% of violent inciting content. What was most worrying about comments by Frances Haugen, who will be before the media committee tomorrow, is her claim that Facebook now rewards hate content. It will target and promote content that elicits reaction when people are thrashing each other, when they are fighting back and forth, when they are getting that engagement and when people are pressing "like". That is very depressing.

This Bill obviously has broader implications for the total world of media, because it will dissolve the existing regulator and will provide the commission with the powers and functions to an appropriate apply and enforce review framework. The issue of the content levy, of which the Minister spoke, under section 157 has, as the Minister says, pros and cons. However, ensuring that we have a fund for original Irish content is essential, as we discussed at the committee. I would echo the comments of Screen Producers Ireland which is looking at a definitive start date for that content levy. We have been discussing this for a very long time. We need to see progress and a date for that.

We also had the traditional media providers before us, because their future is under threat.Content from newsrooms is being used for free online. Just as Johannes Gutenberg put the monks out of business in 1440 when he invented the printing press, I am not trying to hold back the tide. I worked in the print industry for 20 years and I can see that the game is changing. The press needs to try to make people buy newspapers again, but we need to address the future of the media. Hence, we need the report of the Future of Media Commission so that we can have that debate in tandem with this Bill. They have a complementary aspect.

I wish the Minister well and look forward to the Bill progressing to Committee Stage. Today is a major step, on which I commend the Minister. It is important for the future of the media.