Greg Daly
Irish democracy is threatened by Google’s actions last week, writes Greg Daly
Online ads, said Save the 8th spokesman John McGuirk back in March, had always been planned as a key part of the referendum strategy in the campaign to keep Ireland’s constitutional protection for unborn children.
“It’s going to be very significant, we’re going to spend a significant chunk of our budget reaching voters,” he told thejournal.ie, adding “for the simple reason that we have to” and that the campaign’s overall budget was €400,000.
“We have to get our message out there and make sure that’s being seen by people,” he continued. “So we’ll make no apologies for spending significantly online, a significant portion of our budget will go there, but it’ll all be above board. People will be able to see who’s advertising, if it’s us it will have our logo on it.”
Because we have to. That’s the key phrase in all of this.
Readers with long memories may recall the Pro Life Campaign’s early 2015 ‘33 to 1’ campaign that maintained that in the space of a single fortnight in December 2014, Irish newspapers ran 33 articles from a pro-choice perspective and just one from a pro-life one.
That may have been an anomalous fortnight, and perhaps people would contest the PLC’s methods in weighing things up, but broadly speaking most honest people would concede that Ireland’s traditional media are heavily dominated by pro-choice voices, such that there’s a case to be made that our public discourse around abortion has been distorted and even vitiated for years.
All of which makes Google’s decision last week to reject all referendum-related advertising, other than that from the Referendum Commission, particularly alarming.
Methods
There are those who claim that this is a reasonable decision, considering concerns about foreign influence in the referendum, but leaving aside how those who say this tends to be all too ready to excuse pro-choice organisations’ use of foreign funding from the New York-based Open Society Foundation to buy the referendum in the first place, this ignores how Google, unlike Facebook, is banning domestic advertising.
Others maintain that this is absolutely fair, since it denies everyone the same platform, but that’s to ignore that “because we have to”.
There’s an internet meme about equality and justice that shows different people looking over a fence at a baseball game: one needs to stand on two boxes to see the game, one needs one box, and the tallest needs no boxes at all; if the boxes were taken away this would be an exercise in equality, but hardly one in justice, since not everybody needs the boxes to see.
To take another analogy, if slingshots were banned in ancient warfare, Goliath wouldn’t have been too bothered, but David would have been in real trouble.
All of which makes especially worrying Google’s decision to change the landscape of the referendum campaign little more than two weeks ahead of the vote, and makes especially alarming its refusal to justify or explain its decision.
The Irish Times has already reported that Google has declined to answer questions on this matter, and The Irish Catholic has received similar treatment.
Shortly after Google’s May 9 decision, The Irish Catholic put four questions to MKC, the Irish company who handles PR for the internet giant in this country.
- Google say they have made this decision to protect electoral integrity; what do they mean by ‘electoral integrity’ in this context?
- Where is the evidence that electoral integrity has been compromised?
- If electoral integrity has been compromised, what is the extent to which this has happened?
- Facebook has taken measures to ensure there will be no foreign-funded ads during the referendum campaign period; why doesn’t Google simply do the same thing?
The response the following day could hardly have been more dismissive: “Thanks for your queries below but Google won’t be commenting any further beyond the statement released yesterday, which again for info is: from May 10 we will pause all ads running related to the Irish referendum on the Eighth Amendment.
“This is an issue that we have been closely monitoring for a while and been thinking about as part of our broader efforts around election integrity globally. Please see here for our official statement which you can attribute to a Google spokesperson: ‘Following our update around election integrity efforts globally, we have decided to pause all ads related to the Irish referendum on the Eighth Amendment.’”
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So far, so contemptuous of the Irish electorate, but there are grounds for even greater concern. Pat Leahy in The Irish Times has reported that people close to Google and Facebook believe that Google and Facebook had become worried that if the referendum were defeated, they would be the subject of an avalanche of blame and further scrutiny of their role in election campaigns.
This in itself invites the question of whether the internet giants acted as they did in order to hinder a possible referendum outcome, which would surely constitute serious foreign interference in our democracy.
Elsewhere The Irish Times has reported that Google’s decision was made by the company’s ‘global policy team’, with input from employees in Ireland, and that both Google and Facebook have senior executives in Dublin who used to work in government, and take advice from public affairs consultants.
Strikingly, the PR consultant who announced Google’s decision has government links as good as anyone. Ciaran Conlan, MKC’s director of strategy and public policy, was until 2016 special adviser to Minister Richard Bruton and until 2011 communications director for Fine Gael.
It was Mr Conlan who texted Mr McGuirk at 12:24 on Wednesday, May 9, to tell him that in six minutes’ time Google would be announcing that it would no longer be running referendum-related ads other than those put out by the Referendum Commission.
Predictably, No campaigners were outraged by the decision. Equally predictably, Yes campaigners were delighted, and press releases issued by the Social Democrats at 12:59 and by Together For Yes at 15:58 on May 9 were suitably triumphant.
Curiously, though, both press releases were dated the previous day. The Social Democrats one is dated “8 May 2018” at its base, while the Together For Yes one is headed “Tuesday, May 8, 2018”.
One release bearing an inaccurate date might be forgivable – it could, as Oscar Wilde might put it, be a misfortune. But two? That looks like carelessness, or worse. How did these groups know of Google’s plans in advance? The obvious question here is whether there has been some collusion in the referendum campaign, and whether big business is working hand-in-hand with politicians and campaigners to change Irish law.
Google, of course, isn’t saying.
Given Google’s near-monopolistic position in online searches and its overwhelming dominance through Youtube of internet videos, its mid-campaign changing of the electoral landscape, its links to Yes campaigners, and its scorning of any transparency by refusing to justify its electoral interference shows how empty its old motto ‘don’t be evil’ has become.