Senator John McGahon- speech from 20 Oct 2021

Thank you, thank you Leader, or thank you Cahirloch, and yes Leader, you know with those couple of emails I got I just deleted them all straight away, when it's a copy and paste job you can't take it too seriously and I want to focus on the rest of that as well, when we have two-thirds of people in ICU in this country, two-thirds of the people in ICU are non-vaccinated people, what more does that need to tell you about the power and the strengths of vaccines, scientific evidence that vaccines work, and this links into the points that I want to make about Facebook and the prevalence of COVID misinformation on Facebook and Facebook groups, which I've been talking for the last year, and this morning we've heard reports that Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is planning a rename of Facebook, a total rehaul and a rename of it, and I just want to say that's not going to remove the toxicity around the concept of what Facebook has become, and we have seen, especially in August of this year, we've seen that Facebook have said that they've removed dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of anti-vax sites, but yet we have huge anti-vax protests, well not huge anti-vax protests, it would be a rabble of head the balls, but a couple of them coming along on Thursday tomorrow, and that's all been advertised on Facebook and through Facebook, stuff like saying that it's not child-friendly protests, and that we have to, and I quote, we are the people demanding this caretaker government stand out immediate effect at the continuance of medical apartheid and the lockdown of this people, like these are people online who have been radicalised online, and we saw excellent testimony before the United States Senate last week of Francis Horne, who said that in order for Facebook to maximise its profits, they decide what the algorithm is, and they decide what, and more outrageousness and more hate bounces off another, and that's how the algorithm is formed, and it just increases the level of toxicity online, it increases the level of hatred online, and as a result, we see this type of stuff where we have people going into hospitals to say that vaccines are killing people, we're going to take you out and save you, and then they're dying a few days later. There has to be something seriously done about COVID misinformation that is spreading online on Facebook, and the way we do it at Cahirloch is governments now absolutely have to step in and regulate this because social media has failed to do it time and time again.