Gavan Reilly: Should there be the freedom to lie during elections?

Last week the government signed off on some low-profile changes to how we run elections in Ireland – and I’m a little surprised they didn’t gather a little more public attention.

Most would agree that elections should be a free and fair contest of ideas and policies, but that those policies should be based on objective reality. To that goal, the new Electoral Commission being established this year will also now have the power to regulate posts on social media, forcing the likes of Twitter or Facebook to label a post as ‘misinformation’ – or potentially to delete it altogether.

But speaking to me on Newstalk on Sunday, the Minister for Electoral Reform, Malcolm Noonan, admitted the Government hasn’t yet been decided whether the same powers could extend to other websites – including, for example, those of political parties.

A quick hypothetical example explains how odd this is. Today there’s an ongoing disagreement between the government and Sinn Fein over whether EU law allows any further cuts on the excise on petrol and diesel.

In an election time, this dispute could be sent to the Electoral Commission – which could ‘decide’ the truth, and force campaign tweets to be deleted, while potentially allowing the same claims to remain published on that party’s website. This would be nonsensical.

On the other hand, giving an election regulator (a State body!) the power to decide what can and cannot be said during an election campaign seems an Orwellian development.

The idea that an election watchdog could force a website to remove content – which is the basis for genuine political debate – is worrisome. And if content could be forcibly removed from a party website, why not a news site?

Surely disputes between parties at election time are best resolved by impartial journalistic investigation, rather than giving a State body the right to decide what you can and cannot say.