Politicians like to say that elections are won on doorsteps. But most of them now spend almost as much time on their Facebook pages and WhatsApp groups.

According to the latest figures from Ipsos MRBI, three out of four Irish adults have active daily Facebook or WhatsApp accounts. That adds up to more attention on mainstream social media than television, radio or newspapers.

But with great power comes great concern: who is policing Facebook and messaging groups for misinformation, planted false stories and algorithm-gaming?

It’s not the BAI. It’s not the telecoms regulator, Comreg. And it’s not the Press Council of Ireland or Press Ombudsman. Unlike broadcasting or print, there is no official policing for fairness, accuracy or balance.

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Invariably, it comes back to the companies themselves.

“We believe Irish electoral law needs to be brought into the 21st century to give clarity to everyone,” said a spokeswoman for Facebook Ireland.

“Questions around what constitutes a political ad, who should be able to buy them, how much they can spend on them and what they can say – these are all questions that can only be properly decided by parliament and regulators.”

Techniques for skewing political debate have moved beyond the creation of outright false headlines claiming that a particular candidate has been endorsed by the Pope.

Modern methods can be subtle and sophisticated, playing off algorithms. This includes getting dozens, or hundreds, of people to swarm online, all leaving comments under a news article or candidate post. Or to search repeatedly for a candidate’s name in an attempt to skew the search engine’s algorithm.

According to Facebook, it has a number of election safety measures in place, although they’re mostly targeted at paid adverts. This means that they don’t cover most content in newsfeeds, Facebook groups or from individuals posting comments.

“Anybody who wants to run political ads must go through a verification process to prove who they are and that they live in Ireland,” a Facebook spokeswoman told us. “Every political ad is labelled so you can see who has paid for them.

“Also, anybody can click on an ad they see on Facebook and get more information on why they are seeing it, and we put them in an ad library so that everyone can see what ads are running, what types of people saw them and how much was spent.”

The spokeswoman also said that Facebook is cracking down on ‘fake accounts’ and using a combination of artificial intelligence and a partnership with TheJournal.ie to identify and label fake images or videos.

Susan Daly, managing editor of Journal Media, said that the online news company’s ‘FactCheck’ service has recently debunked two images on Facebook — one of Arlene Foster purporting to have an Irish passport and another of a SpaceX rocket launch that was incorrectly labelled as an Iranian missile launch.

She said that it had not recently fact-checked any video on Facebook.

In all, she said, Facebook has 500 people “working full time on elections security”, albeit on an international basis.

But the company believes that there’s only so much it can do to self-police the platform.

“Given the sensitivity around political ads, I’ve considered whether we should stop allowing them altogether. From a business perspective, the controversy certainly isn’t worth the small part of our business they make up,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently told an audience at the US Georgetown University on the subject.

“Even if we wanted to ban political ads, it’s not clear where we’d draw the line. There are many more ads about issues than there are directly about elections.

“Would we ban all ads about healthcare or immigration or ­women’s empowerment? If we banned candidates’ ads but not these, would that really make sense to give everyone else a voice in political debates except the candidates themselves?

“There are issues any way you cut this, and when it’s not absolutely clear what to do, I believe we should err on the side of greater expression.”

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