The woman who’s putting manners on Facebook
She’s the soprano-singing Galway TD who is determined to regulate social media giants – and she tends to get what she aims for! Meet...
FIVE years ago, on a Thursday evening in July, a Galway schoolteacher was sitting on her couch at home when she received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognise. After briefly puzzling over who it might be, she hit the green button and said hello.
It was a call that changed her life.
Hildegarde Naughton, who grew up in Oranmore, was a schoolteacher living in Galway city. She had been serving as a Galway City councillor for Fine Gael for four years, and had always made clear a desire to move up to the national parliament one day. But she still wasn’t expecting the taoiseach to appoint her to the Seanad.
She even jokes that she questioned if it was actually Enda Kenny on the other end of the line, despite his unmistakable Mayo lilt.
‘I remember where I was,’ she smiles. ‘I was in my sitting room, I was talking to a friend on the phone and I just hung up, she had sent me a text afterwards and I was in the middle of texting her. I had got a new phone actually, so I didn’t recognise any numbers. So I didn’t know who it was initially,’ she says. ‘And you were afraid to think is this actually Enda Kenny, is it Enda Kenny?’
It really was. The taoiseach told her that Martin McAleese was stepping down from Seanad Éireann. And so, he wondered, would Hildegarde like to take his place?
She didn’t need to think too hard about the offer. ‘It was a great opportunity… I was stunned to get the call, but it was a huge opportunity.’
That was a Thursday night: by Tuesday morning she had arrived in Dublin and was taking her seat in the Seanad, filling the massive shoes of Dr McAleese, the husband of the former President of Ireland Mary McAleese.
And yet as much as her elevation to the Oireachtas was something of a whirlwind, it was certainly no fluke. Politics was, to some extent, already in her blood. She grew up in a Fine Gael household – the only daughter of PJ and Marguerite Naughton – and often spent time on the doors canvassing with other candidates over the years.
Having spent a brief stint working with a trade board in Chicago due to her French and economics degree, she had spent some time in northern France where she worked in a university and primary school.
On her return to Galway she spent time working with the multinational APC there, before she completed her diploma in teaching and moved on to work in a primary school in the city for ten years.
It was through this work in the city, that her family’s Fine Gael roots came to the fore and she decided she wanted to immerse herself in community work.
‘I just always felt I wanted to do more, something else – just to kind of give back. I did a lot of charity and fundraising events, and I raised €300,000 for charities in Galway city and county. And I just got this sense of “I’d love to do more of that…” – to give back in some shape or form.’
And the party just seemed like the natural fit for her too as it’s in her blood.
‘When I entered politics in 2009, I always said I wanted to run for the Dáil… I was very clear to Fine Gael when I was running that time that I wanted to work my way up to that. And being in local politics was a great experience and an important part of that pathway to the Dáil.
‘Enda Kenny knew it was something I wanted, and I had served as mayor and I ran in the 2011 general election. I did very well, but I didn’t get elected.
‘So I presume that they felt they had a good chance of getting a second seat with me getting elected in that area from the work that I had done, the fact that I had run in 2011 on a four-candidate ticket and had done well as a relative unknown – I wasn’t mayor at the time, I was only two years in politics.’
Her time on Galway City Council was not without controversy and she came to attention in 2011 when she denied the then presidential hopeful David Norris the opportunity to address councillors as he sought nominations for the race.
But she later said that was a mistake and ‘put her hands up’ and tried to rectify it.
Back then, she was clearly a determined woman with a goal in mind in terms of her political career and had something she wanted to accomplish.
Fast-forward five years and she has achieved all of that. After winning a seat in the 2016 general election, she has since become a quiet presence in the
big old house on Kildare Street. While she is quiet, some say reserved, she’s not out looking for soundbites. As well as local issues, she has risen to be the chair of two vital Oireachtas committees: the Communications, Climate Action and Environment Committee and the Special Joint Committee on Climate Action. (She also she sits on the Education Committee.) And it is in the role of chairing the Communications Committee that she has taken on what could be a career-defining issue. This is the woman who is going to put manners on Facebook.
That may be quite a thing to say about a parliamentary representative – not even a minister – from a small EU member state: but that is the task she has set herself. And judging by her form to date, once she’s set her sights on a goal, very little can stop her.
THAT is not to say that Deputy Naughton dislikes Facebook – indeed she has a Facebook profile of her own – albeit with strict privacy settings – and she fully appreciates the value that social media can add to many lives.
But she’s also seen the dark side of social media giants. And while she supports the essence of what they do, she’s come to the conclusion that they need rules. She may not be the sheriff who cleans up the Wild West – but she is the person who has decided that we need a sheriff.
It is these instincts that gripped her when she watched, earlier this year, the horrifying Channel 4 Dispatches exposé on Facebook and decided enough was enough.
She had seen a wrong that she wanted to right. And since then, that has become one of her primary goals as a parliamentarian.
‘We had Facebook in twice over six months, the first time in relation to Cambridge Analytica, and then about the Dispatches documentary on Channel 4,’ she explains.
‘The real thing that got to me in relation to the Channel 4 Dispatches programme was that Facebook didn’t adhere to their own minimum standards.
‘This was clearly… very harmful material – a little child being physically abused by an adult, that was left up online. These were clear breaches of their own minimum standards. They were left up in order to generate income for social media platforms.
‘And that was so shocking. That programme was so shocking that I really felt we needed to act and that we needed to act now.’
Deputy Naughton also realised that hauling the firm in for another rap on the knuckles would simply not suppose, cut the to mustard. go out and ‘It’s complain easy to, I and keep bringing social media companies in to your committee, but I really realised that this is going to be a fruitless exercise and it’s just going to be a yoyo effect – bringing them in, giving out. And we needed to do something, we needed to regulate and we needed legislation.’ It was laws that were needed, not just words: ‘Some kind of legislation or regulation to regulate these social media platforms because they are obviously not able to do it themselves or are unwilling to do it themselves.’ Now of course all this might seem obvious to many, but in political circles this defiant stand – while fully endorsed by her committee – did cause ripples of shock. Everyone in Leinster House – most of all Fine Gael TDs – had seen how Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had repeatedly come to the defence of the social media giants.
Indeed, Mr Varadkar has twice said publicly that he favoured selfregulation. And it is no secret that senior members of his Government get a lot of support from Facebook in how best to manage their own images. Indeed, many think Mr Varadkar sees Facebook as the key to his winning the next election. And, it is safe to say, plenty of other politicians have seen which way the political wind is blowing and opted not to challenge the tech firms.
Even Denis Naughten, during his tenure as communications minister, was forced to water down his potion. Having started out insisting that the social media firms be regulated, over time he was forced to move away from that position – saying that while he still supported the principle, there were all manner of difficulties in making a social media regulator work.
The Government’s Action Plan for Online Safety paid lip-service to the idea of a tech regulator – but, in real terms, it did all it could to bury the idea in a morass of red tape.
Hildegarde, though, was not for turning.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 1 this year, she walked to the Leinster House plinth following a Communications Committee meeting where TDs had heard yet more excuses from Facebook following the Dispatches programme. Deputy Naughton did not mince her words.
‘Social media platforms have shown themselves incapable of self-regulation,’ she told the assembled media. ‘If they won’t regulate themselves, we must do it for them.’
And since then she hasn’t resiled from that pledge one inch. In fact, if anything, she’s doubled down. In recent weeks she personally has written to the Taoiseach and to Mr Naughten’s successor, Communications Minister Richard Bruton, to inform them ‘of the need, in principle, for legislation such as the establishment of a Digital Safety Commissioner’.
She has also decided that, while she is not going to wait for the EU to act, the more countries that join her the better; and so she has written to every single one of her EU counterparts to suggest they do the same, and to seek ‘their support on the serious issue of the lack of regulation in this area’.
Deputy Naughton has also reached out to all Irish MEPs requesting their support, has set up a meeting with the European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel next month and has requested a meeting with her UK counterparts from the House of Commons.
Finally, she joined an international ‘grand committee’ of parliamentarians publicly demanding a meeting with Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. (He normally sends lackeys.)
Ms Naughton clearly feels absolutely secure in forging ahead with a policy that could change life for millions – and for the tech companies in Ireland. ‘I had the support,’ she explains. ‘This goes back to the support of all of my committee, this cross-party support – it came back to that.’
SHE also points to a recent appearance of the newly appointed Communications Minister Mr Bruton before her Oireachtas committee, where he said self-regulation was no longer an option.
‘He agrees with the principle of regulating social media platforms and that’s a huge step forward,’ she says. ‘So, yes, I believe I do have the support, and we have to make sure it’s good legislation.’
And when put to her that she wasn’t kicking the can down the road, as can often happen in Irish politics, she blazes steely determination. ‘No – we have to do this,’ she says. ‘We have to do this. We have to.’
Of course some long-time TDs might say, ‘good luck with that’. Mark Zuckerberg dismissively snubbed the call to appear before a grand committee.
Despite some setbacks, Facebook is still making tens of billions of dollars in profit every year. It has more than a billion users, and growing. The company also wields enormous power and influence among global leaders and policymakers. As well as befriending taoisigh past and present, it recently put Nick Clegg – Britain’s former deputy prime minister, no less – on its payroll as a global PR man.
Past evidence has shown that the firm will use every weapon at its disposal to protect profits – in this instance, by resisting regulation. And Facebook will do it ruthlessly.
Still, the first-time TD from Oranmore seems as unruffled by that prospect as she is about anything in life. Notoriously private, she reveals only that she unwinds by singing soprano with Galway group called Bel Canto, or going for a run with friends on a Saturday. (That way she can more efficiently combine exercising with socialising).
Regulation ‘has to be done’, she repeats – as though bringing the world’s most powerful tech business to heel were no more challenging than knocking out five miles on a Saturday morning.
To which all I can say is: Facebook had better watch out.