Musk ‘stoked up hate in Ireland’
Tycoon and firm X are denounced by deputies
ELON Musk ‘personally served to stoke up hatred in Ireland’ and should be ‘ashamed’, an Oireachtas committee heard yesterday.
The owner of X, formerly Twitter, came in for swingeing criticism, as did his company, which failed to send a representative to appear before politicians.
Fine Gael TD Ciarán Cannon was speaking during the hearing with social media companies yesterday, when he set his sights on billionaire Mr Musk, remarking: ‘I would also invite them to drop an email to the owner of Twitter suggesting to him that he desist from commenting on affairs in Ireland which he patently knows nothing about and he personally served to stoke up hatred and conflict in recent times here in Ireland and he should be deeply ashamed of those actions.’
‘I don’t think that’s good enough’
Mr Musk has tweeted that Leo Varadkar ‘hates the Irish people’.
He added in another post: ‘The current Irish government clearly care more about praise from woke media than their own people.’
Mr Cannon’s comments come as social media firms yesterday explained their reaction to the Dublin riots which resulted in millions of euro worth of damage to public infrastructure.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin said in the aftermath of the riots that he was concerned at the ‘rapid mobilisation of so many people via social media platforms’.
Dublin-headquartered companies Meta, TikTok and Google appeared before the Oireachtas media committee to discuss disinformation, media literacy and the response to the riots that made headlines internationally.
Members of the committee criticised Mr Musk’s X for not appearing. Sinn Féin TD Imelda Munster said that its non-attendance was partly because of ‘ongoing legal proceedings’ and asked for clarity on what that referred to. ‘I don’t think that’s good enough,’ she said.
Dualta Ó Broin, head of public policy of Meta in Ireland, told the committee the company had taken ‘significant’ steps to tackle false information, and had removed 1,000 pieces of misinformation from Facebook in the first half of this year. He said they have partnered with 26 fact-checkers across the EU, and that ‘debunking’ labels have been applied to 1.1 million posts on Facebook originating in Ireland in the first half of this year. He said that virality was identified as a problem for its messaging app WhatsApp, but that as it was an encrypted messaging service, it could not do anything about a post unless it was reported. Mr Ó Broin said that Facebook got in contact with the gardaí when the Dublin riots unfolded, and the purpose of that was to establish what was happening. He said that there was a large team across the country engaging that evening to ensure that ‘decisions were being made quickly and accurately’ on the posts on its platforms.
Ryan Meade, Google’s government affairs and public policy manager in Ireland, said the company was ‘committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online’. He said that ‘helping people sort facts from fiction has never been more important, something we saw most recently during the disturbing events in Dublin’.
Mr Meade said that both the knife attack at Parnell Square East and the Dublin riots were monitored by Google to see if incitement to hatred or dangerous disinformation was created in response, but he said this was not seen on its platforms on ‘the first day’.
He said Google subsequently had discussions with Ireland’s new media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, about the steps it was taking, remarking: ‘During incidents such as these, we focus not only on tackling harmful or illegal content, but also ensuring our systems prioritise connecting users with high-quality news from authoritative sources.’
Susan Moss, head of public policy for TikTok Ireland, said it activated its crisis management protocols in response to the Dublin riots in order to prevent the spread of misinformation.
Ms Moss said that there were 25 individual claims or ‘stories’ circulating on TikTok that day, giving the example of one that claimed the military was moving into O’Connell Street.
She said content that was false was removed from being recommended to other users, and said that TikTok’s response was ‘very fast-moving’ and ‘really confident’. She said that ‘disinformation is not a new problem, but the internet provides a new avenue to an old challenge’.
Ms Moss said: ‘We treat disinformation with the utmost seriousness and we are committed to preventing its spread, while elevating authoritative information and investing in media literacy to help build resilience in our community.’
‘Utmost seriousness’