Ireland urged to follow UK in cracking down on scam adverts online

Paul Tweed

The Online Safety Bill currently before Westminster will be amended to add a new legal duty requiring the largest and most popular social media platforms and search engines to prevent paid-for fraudulent adverts appearing on their services, the UK government announced this week.

The move has been welcomed by lawyer Paul Tweed, who last month secured a settlement for broadcaster Miriam O’Callaghan in her Irish High Court action against Facebook over fake advertisements using her name and image.

Meta Platforms Ireland, formerly known as Facebook Ireland, apologised “unreservedly” to Ms O’Callaghan and gave an undertaking “that it will use robust measures to tackle such advertisements in the future and will offer the ability within Ireland to report scam ads via an additional scam ad reporting tool”.

Mr Tweed told Irish Legal News: “The UK government’s decision to make a last-minute amendment to their Online Safety Bill introducing a specific reference to fake ads is a welcome, albeit somewhat belated, step in the right direction.

“Hopefully the Irish government will follow suit, and take the lead from the landmark settlement achieved by Miriam O’Callaghan, and also concentrate on misinformation and disinformation, which remains a very serious problem which falls to Ireland to address, given that most of these platforms have their EMEA headquarters in Dublin.”