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The Indo Daily

Graham Norton v Meta, and the age of unavoidable online deception

22 Jun 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What alarming issue is Graham Norton facing online?

1.837 - 22.918 Fionnán Sheahan

No Irish Need Apply. It's a strange thing to say, and I was surprised by that. But it was interesting, and it was interesting to hear the words No Irish, No Irish Need Apply, and it was interesting to hear the words and to hear them in English.

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24.119 - 27.102

Seachtain, the Irish language.

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30.862 - 34.827 John Molloy

Hey there, we are Indosport. With me, John Molloy, we cover sport and we have things like this.

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35.989 - 52.129 Ciara McGeehan

I was kind of blunt. Well, yeah, world's not fair. You have stage four cancer. Oh, well, world's not fair. But sometimes I think that bluntness helps me. And like me and Tommy have a terrible sense of humour. I think it's really hard for people who don't know us very well because sometimes we throw out something really, really dark and people are like, Jesus, Ciara.

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52.209 - 58.337 Ciara McGeehan

They haven't been around me on this process long enough just yet for me to throw out a little bit of that. But me and Tommy find our ways to cope.

Chapter 2: How did Graham Norton achieve a legal victory against Meta?

62.418 - 65.022

This is an Irish Independent Podcast.

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70.972 - 80.487 Fionnán Sheahan

Graham Norton is best known for conjuring up a warm and convivial vibe as he welcomes a parade of A-list talent to his BBC chat show.

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81.388 - 86.116 John Mulligan

So this is a situation where we're allowed to, if one of us pulls this lever, she flips.

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87.358 - 89.421

Yeah. Okay. As you just did to me. LAUGHTER

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89.755 - 95.304 John Mulligan

By the way, this is the best time I've ever had on a talk show.

95.324 - 115.257 Fionnán Sheahan

But lately, the acclaimed entertainer has confessed to feelings of very significant alarm, distress and anxiety. The source of this anguish? A social media account seemingly dedicated to spreading false information about him, one that Norton is currently seeking to uncover.

115.675 - 124.425 Adrian Weckler

He said if people were to believe this, it would cause serious harm to my relationships with employers, commercial partners, broadcasting platforms and the public.

124.445 - 135.097 Fionnán Sheahan

But Hayes is not the only well-known face being used as an avatar for disinformation, especially as artificial intelligence continues to evolve by the second.

135.117 - 142.105 Micheál Martin

So this is clearly very false material pertaining to myself, illustrative of the kind of manipulation and distortion that can take place on social media.

Chapter 3: What types of disinformation are celebrities encountering?

154.969 - 158.035 Adrian Weckler

It's a much more mainstream idea now.

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158.015 - 174.859 Fionnán Sheahan

I'm Fionnain Sheehan, and today on the IndoDaily, I'm joined by Adrian Weckler, technology editor with the Irish Independent, and by John Mulligan, senior business journalist with the Irish Independent, to look at Graham Norton's case against an increasingly deceptive multimedia landscape.

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180.02 - 198.265 Fionnán Sheahan

John Mulligan, so Graham Norton has got a major legal victory in a California court against the mighty Facebook or Meta as they're known corporately. What exactly is this case and what was the outcome?

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198.818 - 224.131 Adrian Weckler

So there was a Facebook page set up last December. Greg Norton, as he became aware of this in January, and this Facebook account is called the Westminster Wire. It has about 9,000 followers or so. He has told the California court that this Facebook account purports to be a site that reports UK or pop culture, general pop culture news, etc.

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224.471 - 249.625 Adrian Weckler

But he said in reality, he said it's exclusively or almost exclusively contains posts about him. And these posts are false. and creates very significant alarm, distress and anxiety for him. This has been going on for months and he is obviously very upset about it, about this Facebook page. And he's been trying to track down who actually operates this page.

250.546 - 250.867 Fionnán Sheahan

Yeah.

Chapter 4: What are the challenges of identifying the operators behind fake social media accounts?

251.067 - 263.419 Fionnán Sheahan

So in order to do that, quite remarkably, you have to go all the way to California and file legal papers there and have a court hearing. And that's what Graham Norton has done here.

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264.26 - 286.53 Adrian Weckler

Yeah, so because of the impact that he says this account is having on his life, which is affecting his mother, his mother reads Facebook and sees these false accounts of her own death and about his ill health that both Graham and his husband have been suffering from ill health, all false posts, AI-generated posts, AI-generated pictures, etc.

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286.971 - 308.762 Adrian Weckler

And so he wants this to end, obviously, as anybody would. And especially in his position, he has pointed out that he is a well-known person, a well-known public figure in the UK particularly. He's obviously known to lots of Irish people through his role in Father Ted and from lots of other work on TV, obviously. He wants to put an end to this

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308.742 - 334.868 Adrian Weckler

And he wants to take legal action against the person who actually operates this Facebook page. But he needs to know who that person or those persons are. So he has had to go off to a court in California and say, I want to sue the people who are operating this Facebook page, but I don't know who they are. And I want Meta, which owns Facebook, to tell me who the operators of this Facebook page are.

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334.848 - 359.068 Adrian Weckler

So he has had to go to court in California and ask a court in California for permission to demand the details of the operators of this Facebook page so that he can then try and launch legal proceedings in the UK. That's not going to be easy. I think Facebook provides information, kind of sort of transparency information about where an account is operated from.

Chapter 5: How is AI contributing to the rise of online deception?

359.428 - 374.288 Adrian Weckler

And actually, when you look at that information that Facebook provides about that account, which is publicly available, it says that it's actually operated by persons or people in Vietnam and India. So I think it's going to be difficult to kind of track down who these people are.

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374.757 - 403.296 Fionnán Sheahan

Yeah, the weird thing about this is you look at this account, it seems to be pretty obsessive about Graham Norton. There is an address in London, there is a telephone number there, obviously false. So what exactly has the court granted him then? Will he directly get the identity of these people, their names, their IP address, their location?

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403.276 - 424.736 Adrian Weckler

That's what he's obviously hoping to get, whatever information Facebook can provide or Meta can provide about the operators of this page. So in terms of what he actually gets, what's he going to get? Who knows? Is it going to be, as you say, an IP address, which is an identifier of where an internet connection has been made and where the posts have been exactly have been coming from?

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425.056 - 439.659 Adrian Weckler

Is it going to be the name of a person or an email address? And this big problem here is what information are you going to get? Are you just going to get more false information about, you know, somebody can hide their identity quite easily online, etc., when they're setting up these kinds of pages.

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440.32 - 452.284 Fionnán Sheahan

Graham Norton is not the only person who has gone down this route, but we're just paying attention to it, I suppose, because he is such a well-known public figure.

Chapter 6: What are the implications of deepfakes for public trust?

452.922 - 478.305 Adrian Weckler

Yeah, exactly. Others have done the same thing, tried to find out identities of the operators of various social media sites who publish false information about them. Obviously, it's a huge problem. But yeah, Graham Norton is just so well-known, certainly on this side of the water in Ireland and in the UK. He said in his own declaration, he said his reputation is everything. And he said...

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478.285 - 498.494 Adrian Weckler

The kind of posts that have been made, they have like racist and hateful views. And he said, you know, if people were to believe this, it would cause serious harm to my relationships with employers, commercial partners, broadcasting platforms and the public. And that's what he says in his declaration. He says he's had to spend time addressing concerns from people who have seen the publications.

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498.854 - 509.227 Adrian Weckler

He said that his mother has seen these posts, posts about his allegedly ill health, which are false. He's had to address those claims with his friends, his family and the public as well.

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509.567 - 531.006 Adrian Weckler

So it's caused a big problem for him because, as he points out, he said if people were to believe these kind of posts that are here and the views that are expressed that are allegedly his views, he said that could really damage his reputation. And his reputation is everything for his livelihood and for his profession. So obviously he wants to put an end to this.

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Chapter 7: Why is it difficult to hold social media platforms accountable for false content?

531.286 - 534.229 Adrian Weckler

Just how easy that is going to be remains to be seen, though.

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534.209 - 568.3 Fionnán Sheahan

OK, John Mulligan, thank you very much for that update. Adrian Weckler, this is your daily life following the trends in the tech world. You're the technology editor of the Irish Independent. You're the host of the big tech show podcast as well. Is it fair to say that this issue of online fake news and videos is becoming more prevalent now with the growth of AI?

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568.28 - 579.634 Adrian Weckler

Yeah, anyone who uses a social media platform in 2026 sees this all the time because it's very easy to do. It's very easy to industrialize. There's a lot of monetary reward to it as well. Scammers make a lot of money.

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580.274 - 601.358 Adrian Weckler

And because the technology has come on so much in the last few years, if you think a couple of years ago, if you saw a deepfake, a video or something that was presenting itself as such... there were always a few little tells. There'd be weird hands, there'd be six fingers, you know, there'd be kind of blinking issues or unnatural lighting. Now it's much, much harder to detect that.

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601.478 - 607.584 Adrian Weckler

And we can see that ourselves, even in our own chatbots that we use every day, the chat GPTs, the clods.

Chapter 8: What new regulations are being introduced to combat online misinformation?

608.405 - 638.23 Adrian Weckler

It's very, very easy to make those deep fakes. Voice cloning, very, very easy. You just take a couple of seconds of somebody's natural speech on their own social media platform. And you can then incorporate that into your own deep fake. Video calls can be faked live. And social media rewards virality over verification. So if something starts to get attention and it's shared quickly...

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638.21 - 643.458 Adrian Weckler

That's where the premium is. It's not to stop and verify the authenticity of it.

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643.478 - 649.126 Fionnán Sheahan

But the more outrageous something is, then the more people will look at it and therefore it goes wider.

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649.446 - 650.728 Adrian Weckler

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

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650.768 - 663.627 Fionnán Sheahan

Yeah. So that's why this really weird pictures of Nigel Frage pulling out a gun purportedly on BBC Question Time. A lot of people are seeing this.

663.607 - 672.505 Nick Ferrari

I don't know whether to laugh or whether to be angry about this. The trouble is, it's an AI fake, but it looks real in every way.

672.886 - 680.08 Fionnán Sheahan

Some people are just laughing at it or looking at it askance, but that's actually helping to propagate it.

680.33 - 703.107 Adrian Weckler

Yeah, and don't forget, if you see Nigel Farage pulling out a gun on question time, think about the person who is seeing that and who they are and what their own cultural context is. They may not know what Nigel Farage does or doesn't do usually. They may not know what question time. time is. They may not be asking the question, would the BBC ever air something like this?

703.507 - 721.491 Adrian Weckler

There's a thing that psychologists call motivated reasoning. And that's if you want to believe that something could have happened, you are inclined to accept it. And that Nigel Farage with a gun on question time, that might provoke maybe outrage, might provoke sort of fear, might provoke schadenfreude.

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