Irish Examiner view: Curbing the toxic force of social media 

The Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill  provides for an online safety commissioner as part of a wider Media Commission to oversee online safety

Maria Bailey, whose political career crashed over her insurance claim against a hotel, said online abuse is “exceptionally stressful and isolating”. Picture: RollingNews.ie

Two former politicians have, in recent days, made very similar contributions to one of the intensifying discussions of the day, one with relevance far beyond politics or politicians. 

That each contribution is so similar, and so very dissuading for anyone who might consider participating in democratic politics, highlights again the need for powerful legislative intervention to curb what has, in a few short years, become a toxic force in public life. 

Though each woman — former Fine Gael TD Maria Bailey and former American secretary of state and first lady Hilary Clinton — have very different CVs they speak as one on the issue of online abuse.

Ms Bailey, whose political career crashed over her insurance claim against a hotel, said online abuse is “exceptionally stressful and isolating”. 

Her experience has convinced her to support the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill, which is making its way through the Oireachtas. 

It provides for an online safety commissioner as part of a wider Media Commission to oversee online safety. 

Such a watchdog is urgently needed, even if the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has warned about aspects of the proposed legislation. 

ICCL outlined concerns about freedom of expression, the right to send and receive information, and the right to privacy.

Though Mrs Clinton’s experiences are of an entirely different depth and reach to one-term TD Maria Bailey, she reaches the same conclusions. 

She insists that her 2016 bid for the White House was swamped by a tsunami of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. 

Now she is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation, even if that means curbing the power of big tech. 

Ms Clinton warns that the breakdown of shared truths, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy just as China argues ever more forcefully that autocracy works.

In a society where social media is used to rewrite history, almost by the day, almost by the issue, these are huge questions but a bigger, more pressing one is pushing its way into the debate: Are discussions around social media already a day late and a dollar short? 

Are the ideas of honesty or dishonesty as regarded as they once were or at least once appeared? 

More than 74m Americans voted for Donald Trump and it is impossible to imagine that most of them did not realise he was a serial liar yet they endorsed him.

This weekend, votes are being counted across Britain in local, regional or mayoral elections. In a by-election at Hartlepool Boris Johnson’s Conservatives took the seat for the first time in its 47-year history. 

The result — which turned a Labour majority of 3,600 into a Tory win by nearly 7,000 votes — was “a mandate” to press on, harrumphed Johnson.

That this result was achieved after a relentless flow of Tory scandals and one porky after another from Johnson suggests that the distinction between honesty and dishonesty has become almost irrelevant. 

That social media played a part in that change is obvious but so too is the fact that we need something far more profound than a set of rules to curb online dishonesty. 

We need to restore, and then defend, the idea of honesty as a defining security in how we do business.