A NEW REPORT analysing more than 13 million posts has been released today, shedding light on how misinformation about Covid-19, Russia and climate change, as well as hate material targetting migrants and LGBTQ+ people, is delivered to Irish internet users. The report, called Uisce Faoi Thalamh (literally Irish for “water under ground” – an idiom for “conspiracy”), was published by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a counter-extremism think-tank.
It outlines how misinformation and conspiracies have been pushed across social media platforms and alternative media sites since the start of the pandemic. The comprehensive report also strongly points toward foreign influences shaping the stories spread in fringe groups, which often describe themselves as nationalists in opposition to “globalism”. The analysis, which tracked more than 1,640 accounts that spread disinformation from the start of 2020 to April 2023, showed a major spike in posts about health early in 2020, when the Covid pandemic began