The Minister for Migration has described the environment in which social media companies in Ireland operate as being the “wild west”.
Minister for State and Dublin South West FG TD Colm Brophy was speaking at an anti-racism conference in Dublin.
He said the government strongly condemned all forms of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and intolerance and that they were determined to stamp out hate-motivated crimes.
Going off-script to delegates at the ICTU-backed “Stronger Together” conference at the Communiciations Workers Union headquarters, the Minister said social media companies weren’t doing enough to stop falsehoods.
It follows-on from government attempts, through EU directives and Coimisiun na Mean, to bring more regulation to the workings of social media companies.
“I think there needs to be a serious reconsideration of how social media works particularly in the area of the dissemination of completely misleading and false information and the putting up, recording and disseminating of videos depicting attacks on people. This is the type of stuff that’s totally unacceptable,” said the Minister.
US President Donald Trump last month vowed to impose new tariffs on countries that affect American technology companies. His comments were taken as a threat against the EU’s digital rules to rein in companies like Google, Apple, and Meta.
The EU’s Digital Services Act aims to regulate or ‘clean-up’ social media and online platforms.
While not mentioning any specific companies, Minister Brophy said free speech came with rights and obligations.
“The notion that somebody [on-line] can literally ignore truth, ignore facts and put forward a narrative based on lies and falsehood is unacceptable to me,” he said.
The comments were welcomed by the General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Eoin Reidy, who said many online companies are much more powerful than nation states.
RACISM
At the same conference, Dr Ebun Joseph, the Special Rapporteur for racial equality, strongly criticised the government and various departments for doing what she called ‘box-ticking’ exercises in relation to tackling racism.
In July 2024, the Government announced Dr Joseph as Special Rapporteur for the National Plan Against Racism (NAPAR) which was published in 2023.
The plan is supposed to be implemented by the Department of Justice, but in comments that may send shockwaves through the government, she described that exact Department as being ‘massively’ and inherently racist.
“All you need to do is look at who is working there,” she said, “It cannot be that in 50, 60, 80 years of Ireland we cannot find minorities who can be in those spaces. If you look at the various departments, I don’t think we have up to one percent of minorities. There is no government department that has even one percent of ethnic minorities working for them.”
When asked if the Department of Justice can therefore be trusted to implement the national anti-racism plan if they are inherently racist, she said they could but only if they were monitored properly and made accountable by the taxpayer.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Also speaking at the conference Liam Herrick, Chief Commissioner for the Irish Human Rights & Equality Commission, was asked about the possibility of Britain pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Mr Herrick said Britain had “lost its mind in relation to refugee protection and migration”, adding that if Britain did pull out of the Convention, it would be a big threat to the protection of human rights on the island of Ireland.
“The situation in Britain is very serious,” he said. “What you have got there is a toxic public discourse, about migrant rights, which is a race to the bottom. There’s a danger that can happen here too; so that’s why when government representatives [here] speak about deportations and migrants and be concerned about racism when it applies to workers and not other people, we need to be careful.”
For the latest Waterford News and Sport, tune into WLR News on the hour and download the WLR App for news on demand.
