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THREE TDS are to meet with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the company’s European headquarters in Dublin tomorrow.
Fine Gael’s Hildegarde Naughton, Fianna Fáil’s James Lawless and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan, who are also members of the Oireachtas Committee on Communications, will meet the billionaire CEO to discuss the threat of fake news.
The deputies plan to raise a number of issues with Zuckerberg, including the regulation of social media, transparency in political advertising and the safety of young people and vulnerable adults.
The three TDs are members of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and Fake News, which is a worldwide gathering of politicians who meet to discuss the regulation of social media platforms.
The group’s first meeting was held last November in Westminster. The committee will also meet again in Ottawa in Canada this May.
The three politicians have been vocal about the regulation of social media platforms in recent years, with Lawless introducing the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill in December 2017, which sought to clamp down on political interference through social media, but the government opposed it at the time.
The Bill, which is believed to have widespread political support, was later scrutinised in committee.
Facebook found itself in hot water last year when it was revealed 87 million people’s data was improperly shared with the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.
Over the weekend, Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed that was featured in a number of newspapers, in which he admitted that the social network has been in denial about combating harmful content and safeguarding privacy for too long.
“I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators,” he said, adding:
“By updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what’s best about it – the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things – while also protecting society from broader harms.”
It is understood that Zuckerberg will also visit the site of Facebook’s new European HQ, which is still under construction, the former AIB Bank centre in Ballsbridge.
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Meanwhile life goes on at Fukushima.
Only a matter of time when we will rue the day of nuclear power
I think the people of Pripyat already do.
Someday they will learn to handle it properly and safely…
“Someday they will learn to handle it properly and safely” — but what will the consequences be,
when they learn that?
It’s no trick being safer than coal. But what if it becomes safer than natural gas to provide the same power? Safer than natural-gas-plus-wind-turbines? It’s already less radioactively polluting than those systems.
When that superior safety shall be fact, a government that wants to take a billion dollars in natural gas severance taxes and/or royalties and/or import duties will have to accept the loss of some citizens to gas disasters in the bargain. If it allows nuclear energy to be used instead, those lives will be saved, but the billion will, from a civil service point of view, be lost: it will remain in private hands.
No-one will forthrightly deplore that result. Everyone’s official position will be that however good a few million dollars in tax revenue may be, it doesn’t justify an innocent citizen’s death.
But perhaps there will come to be a huge industry of denying that nuclear energy is a lifesaver, and of calling nuclear wrecks that harm no-one “nuclear disasters”.
Perhaps, eh?
Perhaps when the media makes accuracy the priority over profits.. but the scary word “nuclear” sells very well. The headline “Radiation from Fukushima has not caused any health effect” may be true, but it won’t catch peoples attention or sell advertising. They definitely don’t want people to know that fear of Fukushima radiation caused much more harm than the radiation itself, then they might be held accountable…….
Not a single person was killed when the water hit the Fukushima nuclear plant, in fact I have not heard of anyone even cutting their finger there. In comparison around 18,000 people from the surrounding area were swept away never to be seen again. But here on the Journal Fukushima is remembered as a a nuclear disaster. In the press hysteria trumps fact every time.
The tsunami left the enormous death toll,19000, not the incident at the nuclear power plant. The wording of this item is rubbish.
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