HOW QUICKLY IT TURNS TO A SLANGING MATCH by
IMMEDIATELY before the Facebook hearing got under way in committee yesterday, Leo Varadkar found himself trolled on internet malignancy in the Dáil chamber. The Fine Gael leader was challenged by the leader of the Green Party, Eamon Ryan, who denounced the Taoiseach’s silence and alleged inaction while the likes of the Zuckerberg juggernaut and Google took ‘over €300million from Irish media companies’ in advertising every year.
Mr Ryan then asked: ‘Is there anything you want me to say to the company?’
The Green leader is a member of the communications committee. ‘Irish media is on
Political Editor its knees,’ the Greens leader added. ‘How are you going to run Irish media if all the money is going to Facebook?’
The questions were pertinent, and the Taoiseach knew it – which was why the exchanges, like almost any social media interactions, swiftly descended into a personal slanging match. Mr Varadkar commented on ‘the deputy preaching from his perch on the edge of the chamber’, pointing out that Mr Ryan had been minister for communications for four-and-a-half years in a ‘disastrous government’, during which time he had done precisely nothing about the issues he was now raising.
He added tartly that he nonetheless considered Mr Ryan ‘intelligent enough’ to draw up his own questions for the Facebook panjandrums. Mr Varadkar was clearly not giving his own hand away, despite the build-up of public controversies and anxiety about smartphones and young minds, about fake news and subtle influencing, about addiction, pornography and paedophile child-grooming.
The Taoiseach talked about a limited new piece of legislation on data privacy that is to wend its way through the Dáil, and pointed out that media organisations in Ireland were private businesses, presumably meaning they could look out for themselves. Mr Ryan translated: ‘You’re not going to do anything as Irish media wilts on the vine.’
Back in committee, Fianna Fáil’s Timmy Dooley wondered rhetorically if Facebook could follow a person’s web browsing when they had left the site. This produced a disturbing insight.
Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon answered: ‘Users are tracked when they have left the Facebook environment. There are means by which users can switch off the settings, [but] the default is that they are being tracked.’ And it is not only Facebook that is doing it, she added.
As Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley later observed, it is ‘a big bad world, or big good world’ out there, depending on which way you look at it.