TikTok’s data a wake-up call that efforts to foster division are deliberate

Democracy relies on having a set of mutually agreed-upon facts and polarising false information is toxic to this

The uniting factor behind the disparate grievances expressed, whether about Covid-19 vaccines, sex education in schools, immigration, transgender rights, or proposed hate-speech laws, is that they are a roll-call of the hottest disinformation issues of the moment.

The release of the TikTok data this week is the result of efforts at EU level to try to come to grips with this issue. The code of conduct is voluntary, but incentivised by the EU’s Digital Services Act, a major new regulation of online platforms that recently came into force. It requires platforms with at least 45 million monthly users to have systems in place to control the spread of disinformation, hate speech and illegal content, and forces them to expose their algorithms to external scrutiny.

Ireland’s democracy is a rarity in allowing the public casual and easy access to their elected representatives, who roam constituencies knocking on doors, often handing out their phone numbers — something unheard of among our European neighbours.

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