Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Bar anyone thinking I am anti the online platforms, when newspapers ruled the roost, the disinformation in printed news was just as rife. I know in college we used the tabloid battles of the 80s in the UK as part of our case studies and the phone hacking and the pure lies that were driven in what used to be good quality papers. It was just as rife in the printed news as well. However, that leads me to the issue of media literacy in respect of Mr. Godfrey speaking about the need for this and for informed choices. Disinformation is important to me in the context of political debate. Going back to the last US election, a metadata scientist warned a week after that election that 10% of all political content views were of posts that falsely claimed vote fraud. That warning was acted upon by Meta in respect of that data scientist. As the weeks passed, those percentages grew, culminating in the Capitol Hill riot. Still today, 38% of Americans believe the election was fraudulent. In this country after the last election we had claims by a political party that won only 37 seats that they had won the election. That is 44 seats short of a majority and the party claimed Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael had stolen the election. That narrative gained traction on social media as well. We are not that far away from Capitol Hill riots in this country when you see what happened with the Dublin riots. When Mr. Godfrey calls for media literacy, what does that mean in real terms for that 18 to 24-year-old category I spoke about who are accessing social media purely for their news?