Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I was in my office and chairing earlier on, so I was following two different sections. There have been many flashpoints of disinformation and misinformation but one that jumps to mind for me is the Dublin riots. There was a flashpoint there where a correlation, a combination or a coming together of all sorts of different things resulted in what was an extraordinarily serious situation. It was globally covered, and no one could believe what was happening as it was happening. Disinformation was the key thing that set that whole situation off. I might tease through that and what we can learn from that. We need to understand what we can do going forward to ensure something like that does not happen again, as well as the different remits the witnesses have to try to tackle that or even remits outside of those of us within the room. We must understand what is it that social media companies need to do.

One of the issues was that many people perceived social media companies to be very slow to respond to things that were flying around. It took a while, for example, for tags to appear underneath things to explain it was not actually the Army driving up the motorway to Dublin. These things took ages to appear and by then, the videos had been taken off and were flying around on end-to-end encrypted messaging, like WhatsApp and Signal and so on. Another problem was the things that were going online were being taken off, and I know that is being referenced here in respect of the challenges that end-to-end encryption is posing in tackling disinformation. What did we learn from the Dublin riots that can be used going forward in the various guises of those who are here to either challenge or tackle the disinformation as it spread in that instance?

I am thinking of whether something like this could ever happen again. What is it that was learned from the respective organisations here that needs to be done to tackle the disinformation? That is what ultimately resulted in the chaos and pandemonium that we saw on our streets. What do we need to do? At what point do we realise that it has moved from being a mildly chaotic situation online? Those happen; we are seeing more of these flashpoints of chaos online and they were referenced in the opening statements where there are protests outside migrant centres because there are accusations of something inside. Violent scenes are happening and members of an Garda Síochána are being targeted. A Pride disco in Newtownmountkennedy was cancelled because of aggro and threats. These things are having serious knock-on consequences.

I will go back to the question of what needs to be done so we do not end up with a flashpoint where this is happening and the streets of our capital city under fire. Broadly, how do we stop this from happening again What did we learn from that situation? Specifically, how do we grasp disinformation before it gets out of hand? Have the social media companies done anything to make the lives of the witnesses a little bit easier?