John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chairman, for allowing me to attend and join in, as I am not a member of the committee. The reason I am here today is that I have taken a great interest in transparency on these platforms since my election to the Oireachtas. I wish to follow up on what my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, said. With all due respect to Mr. Costello, under no circumstances do I accept the accept the excuse that Twitter is somehow liberating oppressed people in different parts of the world and that is why it is necessary to have anonymous accounts. That is total and utter BS. It is a nice, fluffy answer. Instead, the anonymous accounts are dishing out some of the most horrific abuse on the platform. Every time I pick up my telephone and see Twitter notifications I get pangs of fright and fear about what is next. It is the same for every politician. I would not be on Twitter if I did not need to be for work and politics reasons. It has reached the stage where I believe it is beginning to undermine our democracy.

Twitter is 15 years old and I do not buy the case that this is how Twitter started 15 years ago. Political discourse on Twitter has changed. Ten years ago, Twitter was a wonderful platform where one could engage with people who had different viewpoints. One could engage in and have respectful debates. That is gone out the window now. It makes zero sense to have anonymous accounts that can be set up with five different emails for five different accounts to target politicians, journalists such as Aoife Moore or members of civic society. That is how pile-ons are orchestrated. The point is that there are only so many times one can be called every word under the sun before it rolls off one's back. It is different for some of us because we are used to it. However, if social media companies are allowed to continue with this type of political discourse, we are going to lose some potentially really good young people from politics in Ireland. An amount of people ask me why I even got into politics given the abuse I receive online. They say they would run a million miles from it.

That is the problem with this, and it is why I believe platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are undermining democracies. I do not buy their reasoning that they maintain anonymous accounts because they can unveil corrupt places in far-flung parts of the world. I am referring to anonymous accounts in this country.

As regards Facebook, my colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, is quite correct. By the time disinformation spreads on Facebook, the horse has bolted and it is too late to rebut it. If one tries to rebut something, there is the Streisand effect whereby one is making a bigger story of it by trying to rebut it. When one of us rebuts something that could be completely false, that is then in the newspaper. It is the Streisand effect, so it is not in our interests to try to rebut fake news about us as individuals or the like.

The other point is that there has been much discussion today about what we are doing to fact-check politicians and political parties, but what are we doing to try to fact-check the public? What is becoming a thing now in elections is that in the seven days before an election, which could be a crucial or tight election, people are going on Facebook, Twitter and other online sites to undermine candidates. The new form of online political campaigning is to try to smear candidates. A former Deputy is now suing Facebook and Twitter for damages because of completely unfounded lies that were put forward about him in the lead up to the last general election. Fair play to him for taking it to the High Court. I commend him on that. The point is, however, that the damage was done. The issue is that people see it online and believe it, due to the age-old concept that there is no smoke without fire. There should be a direct link whereby somebody can go to Facebook. The person should not have to go through a lengthy court process, only for somebody to say that he or she put it up as a lie and did not mean it.