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Do citizens feel confident in their ability to identify disinformation? How free should the internet be for individuals to post whatever they want? These are challenging but important questions, which our colleagues at UCD and TCD sought to answer through engagement with citizens in Ireland.
The activity was organised as part of a larger citizen engagement event, which drew attendance from hundreds of Irish residents across all education levels and age groups. The VIGILANT team led the engagement and facilitated discussions on the topics of freedom of speech, the criminalisation of speech, and the role of the police in these matters. The results offered valuable insights into public attitudes towards such complex themes and also provided attendees with an opportunity to discuss these questions directly with the VIGILANT team on the ground.
What did we find out?
The attendees generally inclined towards agreeing that:
- they are confident identifying disinformation
- police should be able to monitor and remove disinformation to prevent criminal activities
- police should comply with strict rules when monitoring social media
- they do not trust the police to limit their activities to monitoring of criminal activities
and disagreeing that:
- they trust the information shared on social media
- they trust the information from the national media
- the internet should remain free and open and the responsibility to identify disinformation should lie in everyone's own hands
- people should have a right to believe disinformation
- individual rights to post disinformation are more important than societal good
- police should not patrol the internet or monitor social media
while they could not clearly agree on whether:
- people should be free to post whatever they want on the Internet.
See more in the photos below!
