Dr. Eileen Culloty:

A lot of interesting and very important points were raised. What this is getting towards is that disinformation became almost a moral panic in 2016, after the US election and then Brexit. People became very fixated on these pieces of content. That is what disinformation is - a false claim. However, the issue is about influence and what the influences on our democracy are. FIMI and foreign interference were mentioned. When it is thought about that way, someone can influence much more broadly. Someone can think about countries that are funding academic institutions and countries that fund particular research bodies or major tech companies with lots of views on our politics and our laws. Is that not a type of interference? In addition, particularly coming from the US, there is free speech absolutism-type rhetoric. Frankly, it is just a completely different political system and is dominating or pushing those values into an Irish space, and then that is repeated as though it is normal here when it is not. We are almost losing a sense of our normative understanding of democracy in Ireland and in Europe.

Free speech is very important in different ways. Historically, the right to free speech has been important in a democratic way and a scientific way because it allows people to challenge consensus. That remains very important. The right to free speech also has an individual sense in that people should be free to say what they think and not be coerced into saying something else and so on. All those ideas, of course, come from a time when most of us had no great opportunity to set up our own media outlets to espouse our views, and that is really what we are grappling with. Unfortunately, however, most of the conversation is completely dwarfed by this crazy US debate that does not apply here. We could have very good conversations about free speech and proper debates about it but, unfortunately, we are not doing so.

It is interesting that newspapers were mentioned in particular because, historically, they have been free to say fairly outrageous things. It is very easy to zone in on social media now as though that is the problem. It is an intensification of a problem that was already there, albeit maybe not as strong in Ireland as we have seen in the UK or the US. The sight of a UK newspaper calling judges traitors is absolutely shocking, and social media cannot be blamed for that. Traditionally, print media was allowed to self-regulate, and self-regulation has largely been a disaster. It has not produced fairness or a respect for facts. Broadcast media were heavily regulated in this country, and we see a different model. Social media is completely self-regulated. The European model is now to co-regulate, and we will have to wait and see whether that will work.

In this environment, where people are free to say what they want and where people with lots of funding and platforms can say things that are actively wrong or against our interests or counter to our democratic values and principles, a big question becomes who we trust to actually provide accurate information. This is where the attacks on experts and expertise become problematic. Having said that, I had some sympathy for Michael Gove - I might be in a minority in ever having sympathy for him - when he said people had had enough of experts. This is related to Deputy Howlin's point about Hillary Clinton and the "deplorables" because experts cannot just be figures on high who tell us stuff. As regards the example given, I would be very interested to know what those databases were that produced those narratives as though that is somehow transparent or objective. Experts have to demonstrate that they are trustworthy, they have to demonstrate that to everybody and they have to do that by being transparent, accountable and open to being questioned.

As regards the Deputy's final point about education, in the US, public education has been massively defunded and privatised. This is why we should be very wary of these things in Ireland and very wary of platforms that come in and say they will teach AI literacy in schools. It is great if they want to give their money to let other people do those things, but we should not abdicate responsibility for education to private companies. We are very fortunate in Ireland that we have a very good education system and a lot of respect for teachers, and that our teachers are well trained. That is not a norm in many other European countries, so protecting education is, long term, a way to protect democracy.