On 28 May 2026, Ireland's media regulator Coimisiún na Meán awarded over €268,000 to three media-literacy and counter-disinformation projects: an online resilience-measurement tool from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), a sectoral implementation review by DCU FuJo and EDMO Ireland, and a public-library media-literacy initiative run by the Local Government Management Agency (LGMA) across 30 library authorities and 330 branches. The grants sit under Ireland's National Counter Disinformation Strategy, published in April 2025, and are funded from a €1.1 million Budget 2026 allocation. "Disinformation is a whole of society challenge that requires a whole of society response," said Media Development Commissioner Rónán Ó Domhnaill.
This is the quieter half of Ireland's information-integrity agenda, and it is the more defensible one.
Two theories of how to fight disinformation
There are broadly two ways a state can respond to false or manipulative online content. The first is supply-side: regulate the platforms, mandate removals, and threaten fines for non-compliance. The second is demand-side: equip citizens to evaluate what they read, and measure whether that actually works. Ireland is running both at once, and the contrast is instructive.
The supply-side instrument is the Online Safety Code, adopted on 21 October 2024, which binds nine designated video-sharing platforms headquartered in Ireland — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X. Backed by the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, it carries penalties of up to €20 million or 10% of turnover, whichever is higher. The Code targets a defined set of harms — child sexual abuse material, incitement to violence, content promoting self-harm — where the case for hard rules is strongest.
The demand-side instrument is the €268,000 in grants announced last week. No platform is compelled to do anything. No content is removed. The state is instead buying capacity: an ESRI tool to measure national resilience to disinformation, a FuJo/EDMO review to map what media-literacy provision already exists and where the gaps are, and a library programme to embed critical-evaluation skills in Ireland's existing public-library "Skills for Life" framework.
Why the demand-side approach is the proportionate one
The strongest case for platform mandates is real and should be stated plainly. Recommender systems can amplify coordinated falsehood faster than any human reader can rebut it; some harms — synthetic CSAM, election-eve voter-suppression hoaxes — cause damage before correction is even possible; and platforms have historically under-invested in safety where it cut against engagement. For that narrow band of clear, severe, time-sensitive harms, binding obligations on the largest intermediaries are a legitimate tool.
But "disinformation" writ large is a far broader and fuzzier category than CSAM or incitement, and it is exactly where supply-side regulation becomes dangerous. Once a regulator is empowered to police the truth-value of lawful political speech, the €20 million fine becomes a standing incentive for platforms to over-remove anything contestable. The chilling effect lands hardest on the dissenting, the satirical, and the merely wrong-but-protected. This is the core free-expression objection to content mandates, and it is not hypothetical: the EU's own Digital Services Act has drawn sustained criticism for pressuring platforms toward removal of lawful-but-awful speech.
The media-literacy grants sidestep that trap entirely. They do not decide what is true; they help citizens decide for themselves. That is consonant with the National Counter Disinformation Strategy's own stated first principle — "protecting freedom of expression" — and it respects the asymmetry that should govern speech policy: build the reader's judgment before you regulate the speaker's reach.
The ESRI grant is the most important line item
The single most valuable element of the award is also the least flashy: the ESRI's tool to measure resilience and the effectiveness of media-literacy initiatives. Media-literacy spending across democracies has long suffered from an evaluation vacuum — programmes are funded, delivered, and praised, but rarely tested against outcomes. Without measurement, "media literacy" risks becoming a feel-good budget line that lets governments claim action while changing nothing.
An evidence base cuts both ways, and that is the point. If the ESRI's instrument shows that library-based or sector-mapped interventions move the needle on real resilience, scale them. If it shows they don't, redirect the money. That evidentiary discipline — the strategy's fifth principle, "promoting evidence-based interventions" — is what distinguishes proportionate regulation from theatre, and it is conspicuously harder to build into a platform-fines regime, where success is measured in enforcement actions rather than in whether citizens are actually less deceived.
A model worth watching
Coimisiún na Meán is a young regulator with a wide remit, and its instincts will be tested as the Online Safety Code moves from adoption into enforcement. The risk is mission creep: that the demand-side toolkit becomes a junior partner to an ever-expanding supply-side one, and that "countering disinformation" slides from building reader judgment toward adjudicating political truth.
For now, though, the €268,000 announcement points the right way. It is small money — roughly a quarter of the €1.1 million strategy budget, itself a rounding error beside platform-fine exposure — but it is targeted at the part of the problem the state can address without putting a thumb on the scale of lawful speech. Build resilient readers, measure whether the building works, and reserve coercion for the narrow harms that genuinely warrant it. That is the proportionate order of operations, and Ireland, at least this week, got it right.