Media watchdog intent on 'making a difference' in 2024

While there’s been a good dialogue with the social media giants like Meta and X, to date, it’ll be how well they adhere to the rules they’re supposed to abide by.

“At the moment the engagement is good,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily imply that compliance is there. That’s something that we have to do quite rigorously.” 

The executive chairman of Coimisiún na Meán is well aware of the task at hand for the nascent organisation.

Established in March, it is essentially a body set up by the Government to — among other things — make social media companies accountable for the content on their platforms.

An Online Safety Code will set out what’s expected of online platforms to protect children and remove harmful content. Fines of up to €20m or 10% of turnover, whichever is greater, can be dished out by the Coimisiún for breaches of its codes.

Self-regulation in this sector is over. And in its place is an independent regulator hoping to grow from a workforce of just 40 when it was established in March of this year, and with crucial expertise within this sector to draw from.

“We’re currently up to 75 [staff], and we’re heading for 160 in the first quarter of next year and we’ll be asking the Government to give us the authority to go up to about 250,” Mr Godfrey told the Irish Examiner.

“The recruiting has been fantastically successful. People want to join us, want to work with us. They understand that the mission is really important.

“We’ve got a number of people joining us from the tech sector, people who worked in trust and safety for the tech companies. They bring us a huge amount of knowledge and insight that we need. And we’ve had people from civil society, who can help us with the understanding of the harms that are caused online.” 

Dublin riots

Having the people is one key step, taking those next steps to begin regulating the digital space is another.

And, barely eight months in, Coimisíun Na Meán faced one of its first major tests on the day that Dublin erupted in rioting and looting in the wake of a reprehensible, violent attack on young school children and their carer in Dublin city centre.

In the wake of this assault, rumours around the attack including the attacker’s nationality were spread quickly and widely. Posts by UFC fighter Conor McGregor also began to gain traction, including his declaration the night before that Ireland was “at war”.

Well-known far-right activists also posted to social media throughout the afternoon and, by the evening, riots had broken out in the city centre.

“I suppose from around Thursday lunchtime, we first found out about the stabbing incident,” Mr Godfrey said. “And we decided that this was something that we needed to do something about.

“Our concerns were there might be imagery of the incident itself that could circulate online. It could be damaging if children saw it, and damaging to the relatives of people who’d been hurt, and could actually result in the identification of a suspect. All those things are to be avoided.

“But then we were also worried that it could become a lightning rod for the incitement of hatred against ethnic minorities or incitement to violence. That is absolutely illegal content that will definitely fall within our regulatory remit.” 

Mr Godfrey said the Coimisiún got in touch with all of the main social media platforms to express their concerns, and they all came back to say they had activated their various “incident response protocols”.

“Once we saw the riots happening, we stepped up our engagement,” he said. “We talked to the European Commission, because the big platforms do already have legally binding obligations but at the moment it’s only the European Commission with the enforcement powers. We will have enforceable powers from next February.

“So we brought them into some meetings with the platforms to find out ‘yeah, you’ve said you activated your response, so tell us what did you do? We’d like to know’.” In relation to the riots, the head of the regulator said that there had been a “general level of promotion of hatred and that creates fertile ground, that when an incident happens, that it can spark worse consequences”.

Misinformation

Mr Godfrey said that a key thing that needs to happen is to reduce the “kind of background level” of content that allows incitement of hatred to become incitement to violence.

He said liberty of expression must be respected, and people are quite entitled to have a legitimate conversation about, for example, the “political pros and cons of immigration”.

“It’s when it leads into hatred or violence, that’s really where we are,” he said. “That’s the line that gets crossed.

“It’s very important that people are alert to misinformation, disinformation. We, along with Media Literacy Ireland, initiatives to try to build up that critical thinking. We have something running at the moment called Be Media Smart running, where we’re saying to people ‘Stop, think, check’. It’s so easy to share content but before you share think to yourself, ‘is this legit?’ If you’re not sure about it, don’t share it.”

An area that Coimisiún na Meán is also keen to look at are the algorithms that put different forms of content into people’s feeds. A common complaint about X, formerly Twitter, in particular in recent times has been the sheer amount of divisive and hate-filled content filling people’s feeds.

“I think we have got a couple of concerns on this one,” he said. “One is what we’d call ‘toxic feeds’. That’s you see one piece of content that’s on its own not that harmful, but then a constant stream of content.

“So whether that is content which is constantly encouraging you to dehumanise a minority group, or encouraging a teenager who maybe doesn’t have very high self-esteem to be worried about body image. We’d be worried about the aggregate effect of the feed.” Mr Godfrey said he would ask social media companies to look at the safety of these news feeds, as well as taking a look at viral content that is harmful. “We want to see platforms take a greater degree of care about content that is about go viral,” he said.

One area they also acted proactively in this year was intervening in the taking down of the video of a violent incident in Ireland that went viral across social media.

“What happened in that context was there was a video circulating and the family had asked for it to be taken down and had not managed to be successful,” he said. “We didn’t have formal powers at that stage but we asked the platforms to let us know what they’re doing about it. And that sparked the interaction.” He said a clear requirement under the Online Safety Code, which was put to consultation in early December, is that harmful content that is flagged is then identified and removed within a reasonable time. Mr Godfrey floated the idea of 'trusted flaggers', where an organisation can flag content to be checked and it can be done so quickly and effectively.

“In that case what you were seeing was an extreme amount of harm being caused to one person, and their family,” he said. “So that’s very important, some of the most heartbreaking cases you come across. The other category is where the content is quite widespread, it’s causing harm because of the number of people seeing it. That’s a different kettle of fish.” 

Elections

A separate area where Coimisiún na Meán will have an important role to play is in the area of elections.

Next year will see the first set of major elections – the locals and Europeans in May – where both this regulator and the new Electoral Commission will be in operation. At a recent Oireachtas Committee hearing, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission Art O’Leary said his organisation would be working “very closely” with Coimisiún na Meán in this space.

In November, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee warned the public to be aware of where they access information amid a Russian threat of interference in these elections. It came after the Government was warned in a diplomatic cable sent by the US State Department of the potential attempts by the Kremlin to meddle in elections here.

“I think that’s always a risk,” Ms McEntee said.

Mr Godfrey said that the remit of his commission is distinctly separate from the Electoral Commission, which looks at regulating political parties and their online advertising and so on.

“We operate much more at the systemic level, but when you look at what are the risks to elections,” he said. “How can you make sure that for citizens, that their right to make free decisions about who to vote for isn’t being taken away from them through any kind of manipulation.

“So you worry about misinformation, disinformation. You worry about [interference] whether it’s generated wherever in the world it is generated. It can be generated from overseas. You worry about manipulative practices, fake accounts, and hacking and leaking, you see all this kind of stuff.” 

Mr Godfrey said a concern also came in the form of hate speech directed at candidates in elections and journalists, particularly women.

“There is an awful lot of misogynistic speech,” he said. “That kind of speech directed against participants in public life is very damaging. And sometimes people just say ‘I don’t want to put up with that’.” He said this is a space that the Coimisiún will work in, and the pressure will be very much on tech giants through the codes of practice in place to deal with these concerns.

From February, the enforcement powers will become available to the regulator and Mr Godfrey was clear that they will be using them if and when necessary.

He said: “We’ll have a function about platforms in their terms and conditions. Some of them have terms and conditions about disinformation and misinformation. They all have terms and conditions about hate speech. We will have also issues around the reporting of content, the flagging of content. We’ll be enforcing those and make sure they deliver on their obligations.” Even in the case of X, which pulled out of the code of practice on disinformation, it will still have to adhere to a wide variety of “binding legal obligations”.

In the case of X, which has reinstated formerly banned accounts such as US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones under the leadership of Elon Musk in recent weeks, Mr Godfrey said that Coimisiún na Meán’s regulatory functions will apply to content “no matter where it comes from, whether it comes from a high profile, high follower account or anybody else”.

“We have information-gathering powers. There are transparency obligations. We will be monitoring all the wide range of obligations in the online safety framework, but how platforms deal with hate speech is going to be a high priority.” 

Which brings us back to Coimisiún na Meán’s goals for the coming year. If this was the year to get started first in this space as the regulator of a vitally important of Irish life, next year is about consolidating that and beginning to wield its powers of enforcement that take effect from February.

Given the length and breadth of the all-encompassing world of social media, and the multi-billion industry it is regulating, it is a significant and difficult task. One that, if it is succeeding, will anger large swathes of people just as much as it would if it was not succeeding.

“I think this has been a year where we’ve been putting in place the building blocks,” he added. “Doing the designations, online safety code, designing the organisation, starting the recruitment.

“Next year is the year we start delivering for the public. To demonstrate we’re making a difference – that's the key for next year.

“There’s only a point in us existing if the platforms change their behaviours to keep people more safe.”

The proof, Mr Godfrey added, “will be in the pudding”.