Last week felt like a turning point in the Republic’s relationship with Big Tech.
On Monday, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced it was investigating Elon Musk’s social media platform X over its AI chatbot Grok generating sexual imagery of women and children without consent. A leaked Cabinet strategy document meant Wednesday’s headlines were dominated by ministerial discussion on restricting social media use for children. By the weekend, it was starting to feel like something fundamental had shifted, perhaps signalling a growing discernment in the State over which tech companies were friends worth hanging on to.
The Government is not leading from the front with these initiatives. The European Commission is already investigating X for the non-consensual images under the Digital Services Act, while the French raided X’s Parisian offices last month as part of their criminal inquiries. And many countries are considering age-gating social media services following Australia’s lead.
But these latest steps can be taken as signs that the State is keen to counteract a decade of criticism of its lenient enforcement of EU tech rules, which started as frustration from civil society complainants but increasingly now comes from other European regulators. Two-thirds of the DPC’s decisions against tech companies have been overruled by its European supervisory body, and it has faced sustained criticism from its sister regulators in Germany and elsewhere.
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Whether this shift in approach leads to meaningful changes in how tech rules are enforced remains to be seen, and scrutiny from Europe is likely to intensify when the Republic assumes the European Union presidency in July. But there are three factors that might lead us to believe this Damascene conversion is coming from a genuine place.
The first is public frustration at the slow progress of tech regulation, just as emphasis has shifted to politically salient child protection. The initial post-2016 political techlash focused on election content, incitement of violence in fragile states and online abuse of public figures. European regulators soon pinpointed technically complex targets for dealing with these issues: algorithmic accountability, data misuse, and market dominance. Brussels spent an excruciating decade building regulations using these technical mechanisms: GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act. But these rules are not yet resulting in impacts that people can feel online, and public patience is fraying.
At the same time, narratives of online harms are now dominated by concerns about children’s wellbeing, which feels far less remote and technical – and far more urgent and politically motivating – than political adverts targeting and algorithmic accountability. It is notable that the two moves taken this past week in the Republic centre on child protection. Likewise, a landmark decision against TikTok by the European Commission earlier this month on addictive design didn’t just cover child users, but was framed as a decision on child safety by the issuing commissioner.
The second factor is that social media platforms have noticeably worsened, and in doing so, reneged on the unwritten social contract that enabled politicians to justify voluntary self-regulation. This is most obvious at X, which transformed under its new ownership, decimating the teams and policies that did sufficient voluntary self-policing to convince enough political leaders that they were well-meaning enough to be left to their own devices.
The seeds of the Government’s change of heart can be seen in X’s demise. Then taoiseach Simon Harris began to change how he talked publicly about Big Tech around August 2024 as platforms failed to act against online death threats against his family, and violence in Northern Ireland and Southport that was egged on by disinformation on platforms like X. He said at that time that social media companies had been “dining out” on the fact that the Republic under-enforced tech regulations, but the “era of self-regulation” was now “well and truly over”.
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It is not just X that has transformed over this time, and the third factor that might lead us to believe we are seeing a real shift in the State’s attitude to Big Tech points to this. Mounting tensions between Europe and the United States have coincided with well-publicised alliances between US tech firms, most notably but not exclusively social media companies, and the Trump administration. This has emboldened a broader range of platforms to cut back on investments they used to make to keep the platforms safe, with Meta, for example, reducing fact-checking and content moderation.
It also freed these companies to take a more aggressive stance against European regulation, backed up by the muscle of the US state department. Irish regulators now face not just multiple lawsuits from the social media companies they are accused of cosying up to, but also threats of visa restrictions and even sanctions from the US government if they enforce digital rules framed by the administration as “censorship”.
The State is being left little choice but to choose sides between European allies and US tech capital, and it appears that, in public representations at least, the State has decided, when it comes to social media companies, it needs to show our EU partners it is on their side.
Pressure will continue, however. Meta has been lobbying the Department of Foreign Affairs to use the EU presidency to push back on attempts to deal with addictive scrolling. And our dependence on tech for tax revenue appears to be increasing rather than declining. But notably, last week’s report from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council found Apple and Microsoft were the largest individual contributors to corporation tax, accounting for a combined 38 per cent, with drug maker Eli Lilly the next highest contributor. The biggest payers were not the more controversial social media companies.
Perhaps last week’s moves signal the State recognises the unwritten contract it struck with tech companies is no longer delivering equal returns. Drawing a distinction between the toxic brands of the social media era and the higher taxpaying power players of the AI age may be an attempt at a reset and a way to balance changing political optics with economic reality.
- Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at thebriefing.ie
