Last week I was in Dublin for two events hosted by the Irish Presidency of the Council of the EU.

On Tuesday, I was an invited participant at a roundtable entitled ‘ Supporting LGBTIQ+ Youth and Families in the Digital Era: Safety, misinformation and Wellbeing’  at the European Commission High level Conference on Non-Discrimination (LGBTIQ+ rights). We discussed barriers to LGBTIQ+ young people accessing support on social media, what strategies they deploy to navigate online hate and misinformation, and how they can be better supported by families and NGOs. Many thanks to Bella, Dillon, Juliane, Ruadhán and the audience for the contributions.

On Wednesday, I delivered an invited presentation to the European Commission Expert Group on LGBTIQ+ Equality. The title of my talk was ‘Support through screens but at what cost? How LGBTIQ+ young people in Ireland navigate online misinformation’. I discussed the findings from an interview and diary based study funded by the Department of Children, Disability & Equality, Ireland.

Many thanks to our colleagues at DCDE (Jean McGrath, Nuala Connolly & Sinead McEvoy) for the invitation to participate. I will share details of the final report in due course.