Overreaching speech control.
Advocacy group Free Speech Ireland has issued a “civil rights alert” as the country’s authorities are working to introduce the Irish Online Safety Code – that seems to be, at least in part, inspired by the UK’s hugely controversial Online Safety Act.
For example, although at first glance much smaller in scope, one point from the proposal is reminiscent of the Online Safety Act’s “legal but harmful” doctrine – it is punishing online platforms, specifically video ones, for content that “indirectly leads to harm.”
One of the ways such harm would be interpreted is even if a video does not contain content of the kind – comments to it are branded as “hateful.” In other words, it’s a platform liability for third-party content. The regulation would treat it as “indissociable from user-generated videos.”