When Ceann Comhairle, Verona Murphy, made introductory remarks at the first sitting of this session of Dáil Éireann, she drew attention to the use of social media to propagate anonymous falsehoods and anonymous abuse against elected public representatives. Few would disagree that the combination of anonymity with opportunities of mass publication transforms the context and content of free speech.
Until now the Irish Constitution had established a balance. What it termed as the “right of the citizens to express freely their opinions and convictions” mentioned in Article 40.6.1 of the Constitution was balanced by Article 40.3 of the Constitution which obliges the State “as far as practicable” by its laws to vindicate personal rights including “life, person, good name, and property rights of every citizen” and to protect those rights from “unjust attack”. Into that constitutional space, accordingly, Ireland has defamation laws designed to strike a balance between freedom of expression and protection of the reputation of citizens.
In more innocent times newspapers, particularly evening papers, were wont to publish anonymous letters with attributions such as “Worried, Donnybrook”. Other letters were carrying the subscript “Name and Address with the Editor”.
In either case, the newspaper was responsible for any defamation in expressions of “convictions and opinions” or privately composed “statements of fact” or “innuendos”. Broadcasting was heavily regulated in 1937, and offered few opportunities for defamation or scurrility. Not so on social media platforms today.
Obviously, internet and social media publication has transformed communication of opinions, allegations, and information, so as to sharply reduce the virtual monopoly previously held by what are now sometimes derisively referred to as “mainstream media”.
It is now a quarter of a century since the valuable publication by Baroness Onora O’Neill warning against monopolistic concentration of mainstream media in fewer but evermore powerful hands. John Lloyd published a similar warning in his book “What the Media are Doing to Our Politics”, a seminal work which examined increasingly overbearing roles of print and broadcast media in the democratic process of post-millennial Britain.
I have written here about the transformative and corrosive influence on Western politics of press baron, Rupert Murdoch.
While Murdoch took on the overweaning power of trade unions, particularly the print unions, on newspaper publishing by his epic translocation from Fleet Street to Wapping, the political power of Murdoch papers, including The Sun and The News of the World remained massively influential in British politics.
That huge power was nothing new. Back in the days of David Lloyd George, newspaper barons such as Lord Northcliffe exercised huge control over Britain’s politics (and to some extent Ireland’s political fate) in a manner later condemned by Stanley Baldwin:
“The newspapers attacking me are not newspapers in the ordinary sense,” Baldwin said. “They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes of the two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehoods, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context…What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”
It was in the US that Murdoch’s media ambition and power has proven to be most transformative and, I think, destructive. Fox News has dramatically transformed American politics for the worse, I consider.
Few people these days can remember in sharp focus the rapid emergence of pre-Trumpian “Tea Party” politics in America. When Trump still considered himself publicly to be a Democrat supporter, Fox News ignited and fanned the flames of ever-increasing radical right-wing thought in the United States.
Many have forgotten hour-long slots afforded by Fox News to propagation of conspiracy theories combined with political invective by commentators such as Glenn Beck.
Beck’s programmes made liberal use of whiteboard, manuscript diagrams featuring Obama, swastikas, and hammer and sickle logos to illustrate harebrained theories, such as that making health insurance available to the less well-off sections of American society amounted was a communist plot to subvert American democracy.
That argument contrasted with a British documentary showing travelling medical clinics providing elementary healthcare services in circus big top tents to impoverished inhabitants of rural America’s trailer parks and shacks.
Fox lent airtime to those who argued that Obama was unlawfully elected because he was not a US citizen by birth. They were given free rein to advance the racist lie that his parentage and birth certificate had been falsified.
We now have Mad Hatter Tea Party politics in which the Queen of Hearts is played by Donald Trump.
Words mean what he says they mean and the fate of opponents is “Off with their heads!”
American free speech is in a dangerous flux with Trump threatening to de-licence his critics.
Wait and see how American IT platforms react to Verona Murphy’s call to put any curbs or traceability on anonymous online defamation and falsification.