The establishment of an online safety commissioner has been welcomed by children’s charities as signalling the end of self-regulation for social media companies. The new measures are designed to crack down on cyberbullying, threatening comments and tactics that humiliate children online. It also aims to eliminate content that encourages suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. Richard Bruton, the communications minister, said that social media companies would face fines if they did not comply...

Amazon has been asked by Irish politicians to explain why its charity platform appears to have helped to fund anti-vaccine groups. The AmazonSmile fundraising programme, through which the company donates 0.5 per cent of the price of a shopper’s Amazon transactions to an organisation of their choice, includes anti-vaccine not-for-profit groups, according to The Guardian. Amazon recently pulled content from its video platform that promoted health conspiracy theories following pressure from US...

Common sense has prevailed in the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Denis O’Brien’s appeal over two TDs’ statements about his banking affairs, Pearse Doherty has said. Mr Doherty, one of the deputies who used Dáil privilege to disclose details about the businessman’s finances, said that if Mr O’Brien had been successful it would have had a chilling effect on the media and the Oireachtas. Mr O’Brien was challenging a High Court decision that it did not have the power to rule on issues he had raised...

Denis O’Brien’s attempt to make Dáil comments subject to the courts would have had a chilling effect on the media, a Sinn Féin TD has said. Pearse Doherty said that if injunctions were available to people mentioned in the Dáil it would prevent news outlets from reporting on the parliament in full. He said the confusion this would have caused was illustrated in the days after Catherine Murphy, the Social Democrats co-leader, disclosed details of Mr O’Briens’ banking affairs in the Dáil. On May...

The government will consult the Central Bank before extending a state-backed home loan scheme, the taoiseach has said. The scheme, which provides affordable mortgages with a fixed interest rate to people who cannot access funds in private banks, was capped at €200 million over three years but this was reached within 11 months. An internal document from the Department of Housing, released to RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland under the Freedom of Information Act, showed that the scheme was put on...