This week Mark Zuckerberg of Meta announced sweeping changes to the rules governing what can or cannot be posted on the company’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Meta, he announced, will no longer pay teams of fact-checkers to identify misleading information. It will also relax its regulations on the levels of abuse – personal or political – that are permitted.
Anyone who uses social media will be aware that whatever fact-checking or content moderation rules were in place up to this week did not prevent false or misleading material or toxic abuse appearing regularly on these sites. And Zuckerberg has acknowledged that this sort of content will increase.
We are now almost two decades into the social media age. It has given many people great pleasure, allowing them to maintain connections with friends and loved ones. Many more have found it a valuable information resource.
However, it has also become an unprecedented and powerful amplifier of lies, false conspiracy theories, propaganda and accidental or deliberate misinformation.
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For those of us working in professional journalism, the rise of social media has served to highlight the importance of the ethical and editorial standards we are required to uphold every day. These include not publishing any assertion of fact unless it has been verified by a reliable source. If we do inadvertently publish inaccurate information, we undertake to correct it as promptly as possible. We are committed to upholding standards of fairness and balance by offering anyone who is the subject of our journalism the opportunity to respond. In our publishing processes, we endeavour to distinguish clearly between factual reporting and opinion pieces. And we promise that we are not beholden to any sectoral or commercial interest. As we are owned by a Trust, we have no billionaire proprietor interfering in editorial decisions and we are free to pursue the stories that matter even when – especially when – the most powerful people in society seek to stand in our way. In The Irish Times, we are also committed to respecting the individual rights and dignity of everyone we cover and to be particularly attentive to the rights of minorities.
I can personally assure you that I see these principles being put into practice every day by Irish Times journalists as they go about their work of planning, commissioning, writing and editing articles, producing videos, photographs and podcasts and designing pages. We see ourselves as accountable in the first instance to our readers and subscribers, but we also account for our work within a broader professional and regulatory structure that upholds the rights of readers and the broader public via the Press Council and Press Ombudsman.
Like any publisher, we sometimes get it wrong. We’re far from perfect. But the contrast with the unaccountable, unregulated and often anonymous social media content with which we are all familiar is obvious. To say this is not to be critical of any particular individual who posts or consumes that content. It’s simply to draw your attention to the importance of professional and ethical journalism at the end of a week when overall standards of public discourse have taken another grievous blow. And to thank you as a subscriber for helping to make it possible for us to produce our award-winning journalism.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
Editor
Five key reads
1) Could one US dollar soon be worth more than one euro? The dollar has only been worth more than €1 a handful of times in the history of the single European currency – on a few occasions between 2000 and 2002 and then in mid 2022, writes Cliff Taylor. Now forecasters believe it may be about to happen again. What does this mean for Ireland?
2) The Government’s new hot meals scheme looks like a progressive move towards stamping out food poverty in Ireland. But questions have been raised about the quality of the service. Ruth Hegarty, a food policy consultant and lecturer in food policy at University College Cork, looked into the nutrition content of the food offered through the scheme.
3) A Workplace Relations Commission ruling is the final nail in the coffin of the right to remote working, writes John McManus. He looks at the case of Javier Osorio, who requested a hybrid work model “where I can work remotely from home most days and come to the office a maximum of two days a week”. The ruling leaves workers to balance home and family life, along with the costs, by themselves.
4) As more hotels and office blocks rise up, where are Dublin’s promised cultural spaces? asks Chris McCormack. The capital has entrusted commercial ventures with a chunk of its cultural future but some of the earmarked facilities are sitting empty.
5) The glacial pace of the reform of laws shows oligarchs remain in control of the World Rugby, writes Matt Williams. Last November there was great hope in the rugby community that many positive new laws would be approved. By December it was clear that the majority of these much-needed reforms had been quashed. On January 1st this year a disappointingly low number of minor law changes came into play.
In this week’s On the Money newsletter, Conor Pope examines 12 easy ways to cut the cost or your summer holiday. Sign up here to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox every Friday.
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