Gavan Reilly: Time to see sense on moratorium

Sorry to talk shop for a moment, but as we limber up for the three-week sprint of a general election campaign, it’s hard to avoid thinking about matters involving the day job.

Coimisiún na Meán, the new entity which has superseded the old broadcasting regulator, is currently finalising its plan on whether to enforce the now-traditional ‘moratorium’ again for the general election. The thinking behind it, as most readers will know, is to allow voters ‘digest’ everything they’ve heard without anyone trying to influence matters at the final minute by making bold and untested statements.

It’s an analogue tool in a digital era. It was well-intended and largely functional when the main sources of news were newspapers and formal broadcasters; it’s nonsensical in an era where those are only part of a voter’s media diet. It’s also bizarre that the social media channels from the likes of Virgin Media, or RTÉ, would be able to talk about electoral material and give analysis that could not be offered on air.

It’s not just daft, it’s also now dangerous. The (separate) Electoral Commission has been set up with the ambition of doing authoritative fact-checking on electoral claims as they come up, and even with the power to order online providers to take down material which is considered untrue or manipulative.

Michael Healy-Rae’s weekend deepfake video of ‘Taylor Swift endorsing him’, while obviously satirical, is the thin end of the wedge. You can easily imagine someone faking a video of Simon Harris saying something outrageous in the Dáil, and not everyone being savvy enough to know it’s artificial.

If the moratorium stays, we could be in a situation where someone - a party, a candidate, perhaps a third party? Maybe another country? - creates a ‘story’ on the afternoon before polling that cannot be authoritatively refuted on the airwaves. How insecure is that?