AT the last full monthly council meeting of Fingal County Council in Swords on February 9, councillors agreed unanimously for all official Fingal County Council Twitter ccounts to stop continuing to use the platform.
The motion calling for the action was put down by Green councillor David Healy, who is since last year the sole Green Party councillor on the council, and follows just weeks after Dublin City Council councillors agreed to the same action, after a motion was put down also by the Green Party in that council.
The motion in Fingal was flagged and anticipated but under normal council procedure could have taken a few months to be voted on.
Councillor Healy told Northside People that he had received support in advance from in particular Mayor Tom O’Leary and Cllr. John Smyth whose support helped ensure that the motion was dealt with at the meeting this month instead of being dealt with at a later meeting.
The reasons for Healy and the Green Party putting down the motions in the two councils are “very well known at this stage” according to Healy.
“Having gone from facilitating a lot of misinformation and cementing conflict and disagreement, Twitter and Grok then moved onto this appalling use of artificial intelligence to create child sex abuse material and generally material degrading people without their consent” the Clontarf councillor said.
“The motion was agreed unanimously,” he said.
“There was a positive reaction from the other councillors when they saw it on the agenda. We all agreed.
“We could have spent a half an hour or an hour expressing our positions.
“There was I think 37 councillors present. Everybody feels the same way about this so that is why we agreed to suspend standing orders and agreed unanimously without a debate”, Cllr. Healy added.