As regulators grapple with policing the ever-changing internet landscape, Dr Robbie Smyth, Head of the Faculty of Journalism and Media Communications, Griffith College, explains how its Postgraduate Diploma in Trust, Safety and Content Moderation Management is a key tool for the professionals who strive to make our online experience safer.

Dublin doesn’t have a Silicon Valley. There are no massive glittering tech company campuses to be found here. There is though quite a lot of expensive glass-fronted office space between Dublin’s Grand Canal and Liffey quays, and in the suburban business parks around Sandyford and Dundrum that are home to the world’s leading online companies.

It is also the site of a battle on data privacy, misinformation, cyber fraud, and a range of other issues arising out of the global pivot into an online society. A growing part of our daily life is conducted online, whether it is streaming music or video, as well as posting our pictures and stories on social media. We all live with at least one foot in a transnational online world. Add in daily messaging, media coverage, news, sports, online games, paying bills, and shopping and you have more evidence of our life in an online society.

A sign of Ireland’s centrality to that online society is found with the publication in January 2023 of details on the scale of fines levied in 2022 by EU GDPR regulators. Of the total €2.9 billion GDPR fines, more than €1 billion arose in Ireland. The scale of fines had nearly tripled in a year.

Last December, President Michael D. Higgins signed into law the 2022 Online Safety and Media Regulation Act. Amidst a range of changes to broadcasting regulation in Ireland, the Act also provides in detail for “the regulation of content available on relevant online services and harmful online content available on designated online services”.

The new Act implements a series of EU directives going back to 2010 and has implications for the social media and online tech firms based in Ireland. They will now face a new Irish regulator with a clear definition of what constitutes harmful online content along with an investigation and sanction mechanism to enforce decisions. Expect a lot more fines!

In Association with

In a sense, Ireland and the EU are setting a new bar for the companies operating across these sectors. Together with the EU Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts, the EU is defining how the internet will be regulated in the next five years or more.

In Britain, the Online Harms Bill has been struggling through the House of Commons. There are a growing number of data privacy and online social media regulations acts on the floor of the Houses of Congress, but not one that looks likely to become law in the coming year. So, it is increasingly the case that it is Ireland which will be the key site for deciding how the internet will be regulated in a European context.

At Griffith College we have been grappling with this across our media and journalism programmes as the social, political, and economic contexts of online media and technology is significantly changing. A society living online needs effective guarantees for the safety of the activities and veracity of the content we are surrounded by.

We are in the second year of delivering our Postgraduate Diploma in Trust, Safety and Content Moderation Management. The students are working in Trust and Safety firms, often outsourced providers who work to keep the internet safer to use for us all. We, lecturers and students, have learned so much in participating in this programme.

A key part of all of this is the trust and safety mechanisms within these firms. The ongoing implosion of standards at Elon Musk’s Twitter gives some sense of the scale of the challenge facing online firms across the world, as well as the regulators and Trust and Safety professionals who must navigate and police these shifting sands.

We can all agree we want a safer happier online society. The journey there is not going to be easy.

To find out more about the Trust & Safety courses at Griffith College, please visit www.griffith.ie