Irish Examiner view: Fury at satire focussed on wrong target

A protester outside Blanchardstown Garda station after George Nkencho was fatally shot by gardai at Manorfields Drive in Clonee, West Dublin. Social media was alive with the false claim Nkencho had 32 convictions for violent crime. Picture: Stephen Collins / Collins Photos Dublin.

The predictable, if not unanticipated, furore over a satirical clip broadcast by RTÉ on New Year’s Eve highlighted the old, almost irresolvable issues around freedom of speech. 

The sketch stirred the waters where that incendiary mix of taste and faith wash over each other. 

The piece showed how licence and latitude can be insufficiently differentiated. 

It also touched a raw nerve — or maybe scratched old scars. In Ireland of 2021, with our all-still-too-tender past, the unspoken subtext remains the rawest nerve.

It did something else too, something at least as important in our besieged, pandemic-ridden, anti-vaxxer world. 

It exposed an extraordinarily shallow understanding of the workings and penetration of today’s multi-platform media. 

Though not as chilling as the American congressman who, at a Capitol Hill hearing, asked Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook made its money, TD Mattie McGrath’s suggestion that RTÉ’s funding should be reviewed as a consequence was at best bizarre. 

Defunding a public service broadcaster in this post-truth age is not a rational response.

It is hard to imagine how some of those offended might react if they were familiar with the diatribes of hate directed at religions, institutions, political parties or individuals — especially women — on media stages. 

The RTÉ sketch was utterly unremarkable in comparison. That social media hate-fests have a penetration far, far beyond anything RTÉ or any regional media organisation might achieve is also important. 

There are all too many. US president Trump is using those largely unchecked platforms to defy America’s voters but there are dangerous examples close to home.

Within hours of the death of George Nkencho, who was shot dead by gardaí in Dublin, social media was alive with the claim he had 32 convictions for violent crime. 

This is untrue but it stirred emotions so volatile that gardaí, wisely, clarified the situation by saying Nkencho had no criminal convictions. 

Gardaí were “very concerned” by “lies” circulated online by “fascists and racists” on the event. That the lie was witlessly recycled by hundreds of people is alarming too.

Over the last months, digital devices have helped sustain our world. They have provided work platforms, playgrounds, retail therapy, news outlets, political theatre or conduits to the world’s vast and different populations. 

Yet, in the context of Covid-19, we are trapped in deliberate, contrived and dangerous misinformation or disinformation because social media organisations, like the tobacco empires of old, are unwilling to change their business model to protect societies.

Last month the Government published its Online Safety Bill that contains a narrow definition of “harms”. 

The bill proposes a commission which should review the definition of “harmful online content”. 

In Brussels on December 16, a Digital Services Act was published and it proposes tech companies take greater responsibility for illegal behaviour on their platforms. 

This, and climate change, are despite the pandemic, the issues of the day. 

If only they could provoke the same interest as a shoddy, adolescent comedy sketch we might be able to begin 2021 on a more optimistic note.