Dr. Eileen Culloty:

On the question of the EU, Russia and China, there is a huge difference in the EU in terms of what is concerning to countries. Our colleagues in the European Digital Media Observatory from eastern Europe are dealing much more - clearly, constantly - with Russian interference. In Ireland, I cannot conclusively say whether there is evidence of Russian or Chinese interference. That is why the monitoring piece is important as interference can be less obvious or direct. When we talk or think about these things in Ireland we have a tendency to be quite complacent and to say it is an issue for someone else and not something that we need to be bothered about. We also need to think on principle.

It is not just about Russia or China but about any state because any state interfering with our democracy is a problem. The nature of contemporary media is such that this type of interference can be really nefarious. For example, in Canada there were issues with employees of fake companies producing content for blogs that were all orchestrated by the Indian State. I assume there was some kind of economic interest there. It can be very subtle and very nefarious but that is not necessarily something journalists or researchers would focus on from day to day.

With regard to the facts, this is again about realistic expectations. There are factual claims that can be verified. When somebody says something that is just completely wrong about how you vote or the earth being flat, that is fairly straightforward. These are also not the things most people argue about. The things people argue about are political. The British political scientist, Stephen Coleman, calls them political facts and says that we should not pretend that these things are easily verified because they are decisions about who gets funding and who does not and about what is going to happen and what is not. We have to be quite honest about that. We also do not want to abdicate responsibility for these things and leave them to tech companies, which are primarily global corporations whose interest is profit. As the Chair was saying, these are US companies and so have US ideas about free speech, which are different from our ideas about free speech in liberal democracies. That has been a very significant issue and it may be one of the reasons we are in the mess we are in.

Fact-checking is very important. In Ireland, The Journaldoes a lot of fact-checking, as do many other journalists. However, if you read their work, you will see it says that some things might be true and that others are hard to verify because it depends on how you look it. Even on the issue of whether there is a correlation between migration and crime, academics have been studying that question for decades and still have not come up with any good clear solution. We cannot fact our way out of those issues. That does not mean it is not worth investigating them because it may be possible to arrive at a conclusion. However, you are not going to arrive at a fast conclusion the night before an election.

On Coimisiún na Meán and disinformation, a great deal hinges on the EU code of practice on disinformation and the expectation that this will become a code of conduct under the Digital Services Act. Working with Coimisiún na Meán and, previously, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, we in DCU have written four reports on this code. Again, expectation management is important because a lot of what the code asks for is for companies to submit reports on what they do with regard to media literacy and to keep users informed and the number of pieces of disinformation they took action on. Researchers have consistently said that this is just not enough and that they cannot do enough with this content. At the moment, it is a lot of companies writing reports and somebody in the regulator perhaps reading those reports. The question of whether any of this is actually going anywhere is still to be answered.