Online regulator should take complaints from public, report recommends

A new State watchdog due to be set up to regulate harmful content online should be able to act on complaints from members of the public, an expert group has recommended.

Minister for Media Catherine Martin has said she will seek to table amendments to the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill on foot of the recommendations.

The legislation will set up a new media commission and online safety commissioner, who would be able to take action against social media companies who fail to deal with harmful content on their platforms. Initially the legislation envisioned that complaints could only be referred to the regulator by nominated bodies and not members of the public.

An expert group was tasked at the start of this year with examining whether the remit of the proposed new regulator should be expanded to act on complaints from individuals about online content. The group’s report, published on Tuesday, recommended that it should be able to act on complaints from the public, if it was properly resourced.

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The report warned that the new regulator “must be appropriately staffed and resourced” when it is set up. It said as Ireland was the European headquarters of a number of social media giants, the regulator would be “very much in the spotlight”, posing a “reputational risk to Ireland should the system be perceived as under-performing”.

Safety codes

The experts advised that the introduction of an individual complaint mechanism should be phased in at a later point after the regulator was up and running.

The commission will draw up “online safety codes” for how social media companies would be expected to deal with harmful online content on their platforms. The expert group said when these codes were up in effect, they were likely to “significantly reduce” the number of complaints from individuals.

As such the report said the online codes for companies should be in force for at least a year before the commission starts to introduce a way for the public to lodge complaints.

After that period the commission should develop a three-year plan for how it would work towards scaling up a system for the public to lodge complaints over online content.

The report said people should first have raised their complaint with social media companies, before coming to the regulator if they are unhappy with the response.

Social media levy

Funding to be able to deal with increased demand from complaints from the public could be drawn from a levy on social media companies, which is included in the legislation, the group recommended.

The expert group said it was “strongly of the view” that funding and staff for the individual complaint system should be kept separate, so a surge in complaints did not pull resources away from the commission’s broader role to regulate online services.

Commenting on the report, Ms Martin said the expert group had “sensibly recommended a phased approach” to allow for individual complaints. The Minister said she would now seek Government approval to amend the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill to include the recommendations.

John Church, chief executive of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said the move to include an individual complaint mechanism was a “hugely positive day” for children who were victims of cyberbullying. “They will be able to avail of a remedy where platforms fail to act when harmful content is reported to them,” he said.

Technology Ireland, the arm of business group Ibec that represents the tech industry, said the sector would need time to review the recommendations of the report.