Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

Galway City Councillor Alan Curran has quit Facebook – soon after he left Twitter.

The Social Democrat representative for Galway City West also left Instagram, Facebook’s sister social media platform owned by Meta.

Curran, a secondary school teacher in Salthill, deleted his accounts in the same week that his Council colleague, Cllr Shane Forde (FG), warned about relentless negativity online towards Galway City Council.

Forde said debate on social media, under City Council posts, was often “toxic”. He was concerned about the welfare of staff at City Hall who are responsible for moderating the accounts, as well as other members who read the toxic and negative comments about their employer.

Curran’s reasons for leaving the platform were twofold. The first related to the “symbiotic relationship” these “tech oligopolies” have with US President Donald Trump’s “regime”, including “their restrictions on free speech, their manipulative algorithms, their removal of diversity, inclusion and equity programmes, their spread of misinformation, their denial of accurate scientific data and the removal of fact-checking”.

He called for Galway City Council not to use Artificial Intelligence for promotional material, and to pay artists instead.

And he was against social media companies’ “massive push to integrate generative AI into their products, scraping data without consent, plagiarising artists, authors and the wider creative community”.

He left Twitter/Instagram/Facebook for personal reasons too, “to spend more time in the real world without the addictive need to check my notifications and obsess over likes, shares and comments”.

Curran is not gone altogether and has joined Bluesky, a ‘motherhood and apple pie’ version of Twitter where people are apparently nice to each other.

Meanwhile, other city councillors are embracing social media. At a recent Council meeting, they agreed to approve expenses to attend an AILG training event for elected members of local authorities on ‘video-content creation’.

Expect more wannabe TV news reporters-cum-politicians appearing on your screens pointing at potholes and whatnot, as you scroll through photos of cats and other people’s dinners.

Pictured: Cllr Alan Curran: Deleted Facebook and Instagram accounts, having already deleted Twitter, citing the “symbiotic relationship” between these companies’ owners and the “regime’ of US President, Donald Trump.