The part Kenny show on news talk with Marter private network during current restrictions. Don't ignore your health concerns. Our expert team is ready to help. My next guest has been monitoring online extremism and conspiracy theory activity in Ireland and has recently seen a major surge online. If a Gallaher is an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and she's on the line.

Good morning and welcome. Morning, Pat. Now, let's go back to the start of the pandemic. When the world went into lockdown, presumably that meant that the time spent by individuals online suddenly skyrocketed. Certainly for most people. Yes, exactly.

And I suppose since the start of the pandemic, there has been, you know, in Ireland what is, I would imagine, still a relatively small but extremely loud and determined group of people who have pretty much attempting to that they've been attempting to push the idea that, you know, covid and the lockdowns and everything involved and in the pandemic is pretty much a hoax. And trying to spread the idea that the government is doing this on purpose to to chip away at our freedoms, essentially.

And as you say, the longer that people are spending online, then, you know, the the longer we get into this pandemic, the more vulnerable people are becoming, the more the people are going to be searching for answers as to why all this is happening to. Now, when they're trying to persuade people on whatever sites they're using, that this is all a big hoax, that, you know, covid is not a threat and you should open your business and do all the rest of it.

Are they presuming that people don't watch the telly from other jurisdictions, that they don't know what's going on? So therefore, if it's a conspiracy? Well, the Germans are in on, the Russians are in on it, the Brazilians are in on it, and they're all going crazy trying to combat covid-19 butcheries. A hoax. What kind of Egypt believes this kind of stuff?

Well, that's a big issue here as well as I think there's a big misunderstanding of the kind of people that fall for these movements. And there's a lot of, you know, calling people crazy and calling people stupid. And that just adds, unfortunately, to the divisiveness of movements like this, because they tend to be extremely polarizing. Conspiracy theories are extremely powerful. And with the right narrative and the right timing, I think that anyone could fall for one.

To be honest. What they do is they play on your emotions. So for someone who say has lost their business, their business throughout, the Americans lost their livelihoods and they have an increasing distrust in the government, maybe a lack of trust to begin with in the media. So whatever is said in the media doesn't really hold much weight with them. And, you know, on top of that, they're watching the, you know, the effect of the lockdown maybe on their kids and their marriage.

And this is, as I say, it's driving people to try and find answers elsewhere. And when you go into these groups, what they tend to do is simplify very, very complicated situations. So something like covid that requires expertise. It requires a level of understanding to really get to the bottom of it. What they do is that they they simplify this deal and they try to kind of take away all the complicated stuff and instead focus on placing blame.

And the brand really likes, you know, very simple explanations to things, and especially in situations like that, as it gives people back a sense of control that makes people think that they know what's going on throughout the madness. So, you know, when you go into these groups, you often see there's a lot of speculation, there's a lot of jumping to conclusions. But then there's there's always a lot of agreement between the people in the group.

So they're kind of feeding off each other's agreement on these issues.

Yeah. How do they explain away the facts? I mean, when you have the CMO or the Minister for Health talking about 101 deaths reported yesterday, thousands and thousands of cases, people getting sick in nursing homes. You know, if there's not a pandemic, what is going on according to these conspiracy theories?

Yeah, well, unfortunately, they they tend to have a way to explain away anything like that's, you know, political failures or ineptitudes are often framed as really sinister acts. And, for example, you know, even this morning I was taking a look through them before I came on and, you know, speaking about the deaths yesterday. And I often think that as well. I'm often like, how do they not see the people that are dying from this?

But they have as I say, there is so much content online that is that is, you know, available to them to explain this for it, for the deaths that were reported yesterday. They believe that they're dying so that the administration of the vaccines. So, you know, they have ways to explain this and they don't have any evidence. For the most part. As I say, a lot of it is based on speculation. But there's enough people out there that are going to agree with them and it just gives them all a kind of a sense of community, really.

Yeah.

So you detected an actual campaign to try and get businesses to stay open in defiance of the rules?

Yes. So there is a pretty well organized campaign, definitely the most organized campaign that I've seen through the pandemic. And it's actually been run out of the UK, interestingly enough, and it kind of has an Irish arm to it. As I say, the movement is pretty small. But, you know, I think that's more of a reason why we need to realize that we need to act on these kind of movements now. And as he said, I mean, January the 6th is a great example of how these where these movements lead.

You know, I've been looking at these movements and especially in a U.S. context for the past number of years. And I've seen, as, you know, fringe, you know, ideas have moved from, you know, the deepest, darkest corners of the Internet to electing people to Congress on these ideas, you know, so Marjorie Taylor Green, I mean, to get a handle on just how bad she is.

And even Mitch McConnell, who has been slithery throughout the entire post-election time, has talked about the toxicity of of her and the loony element that she espouses. But she is one of those who believe that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed because he was going to run for the Democratic Party and therefore destroy Hillary's chances maybe later on.

But they also believed that on the Fourth of July 2019, that Clinton sorry, that JFK Jr. was actually alive and was going to surface at a Trump rally as a Trump supporter on the Fourth of July 2019. I mean, this is the crazy stuff that just defies any kind of. Logic that they would believe this nonsense. Yes, what you're describing there, what you're describing, there are Kuhnen beliefs that I think people would have heard a lot about Kuvan on since January 6th.

And it's essentially a big tent conspiracy theory that has grown on the Internet. It is. And, you know, it has essentially turned into a digital cult. And, you know, that's what I mean about there being, you know, a sense of community behind it. There's a sense there's enough people that are going to agree with this. There is so much I mean, these kind of movements have kind of they've been around for a number of years and they've kind of lived in their own little pockets on the Internet for the most part for, you know, the past number of years.

But 20-20 really brought them all together. And that's kind of what we're seeing, is that, you know, conspiracies about five big conspiracy, Antibalas conspiracies, they've all kind of come together under this, you know, covid Denyer kind of, you know, idea, I suppose. And, you know, that's the thing about Kuvan on when I first saw Kuvan on, you know, three and a half years ago, that was my thought as well.

I was like, these things will never you know, they'll never go anywhere. But, you know, the amount of people that believe in Kuban on especially in the U.S., it's just shocking at this stage. So that's why we can't dismiss these movements.

Some of the Texture's newstalk listeners texting and I have a couple of friends who've been talking about this stuff a lot lately. It's almost like a new identity no matter what it is now, they have to disagree with the media, the government, on pretty much anything they see as the establishment. And they think I'm the fool for believing that covid is what we're told is another one from a news feed. The people who fall for the conspiracy theories often have a relatively recent trauma, a big trauma, like a divorce, or feel that they've just got a handle on their diet, fitness or mental health.

And then covid happened and destroyed their hard won routine or they had horrendous experience in school, basically people who feel alienated in some way. That's the common thread to me. That's from one of our listeners.

Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, kind of what I described. People that are very vulnerable are the people that are possibly going to fall for these movements. And what you're describing as well is, you know, this disassociation kind of from reality. You we've heard a lot of stories and obviously it's happening here as well, but especially stories out of the states of people describing, you know, losing family members to movements like this in the same way that you would describe losing someone to addiction, because it really does send people into a kind of alternative reality where everything that they thought about the world is completely turned on its head.

And as you say, they can't they can't they can't believe anything that comes out of the media or anything that comes out of anyone that they would think is a member of the elite class. I suppose.

Now, this mad conspiracy theories were, you know, found in the dark recesses of the Web, but then with the lockdown and with the arrival of President Trump in the White House, and you had I don't know how many lies he told every day, but he was a consummate liar on Twitter generally. But laterally and belatedly, Twitter and Facebook punished the president for his for his lies.

So where are the people we're talking about who believe these conspiracy theories? Where are they finding him?

I mean, are Facebook and Twitter policing what goes out and stopping it?

Or is that where the conspiracy theories are to be found at this stage?

I would say you can find them on any platform. To be honest, the platforms have kind of proven over and over again that they cannot control what is, you know, what is gaining a lot of traction on their platforms, I'd say.

And, you know, we kind of have to realize that the way that we consume information has also completely changed in the past 10 to 15 years.

And the algorithms and the social media platforms are there to keep us there for as long as possible. And which means that they are driven by like fear and anger and things like and, you know, anything that's going to get people going, I suppose, like that. And, you know, the platforms did make moves against certain movements like especially Cuban and I suppose and, you know, the latter half of last year. But at a lot of ways that the horse has bolted at that stage, you know, you couldn't really stop movements like that.

They had taken on a life of their own. And the other danger, I suppose, that comes with, you know, completely deleting Cuban on communities from Facebook and, you know, other platforms like that is that people are more likely to go further into the rabbit hole. And by that, they're going to seek out platforms that do not censor them. And on those platforms, there is going to be more extremist content. And so they are going to be led further and further into this kind of extremist movements.

And these platforms might have the veneer of respectability. Tell me about telegram.

Yes, a telegram is a new. Well, it's not you, it's actually been around for for quite a number of years, but it's kind of become very popular in the past number of months and especially, I think, at the start of the year. What's up? Kind of scared. Everyone thought, you know, people thought that they were going to be spying on people's messages. So a lot of people jumped off WhatsApp and went on to telegram and said, and it's you know, it's fairly similar kind of a setup to any of your kind of standard messaging apps.

But because they don't they don't have, you know, the moderation that Facebook has, that's so a lot of, you know, movements, that's kind of work. Maybe we're born on Facebook, are now moving to platforms like Telegrammed because they know that they're not going to be censored as much.

Do you believe that the Biden administration and we will be talking about the first fortnight of the Biden administration later on in the program that it will move? Because one of the things that scares all of these platforms is that they be deemed publishers and therefore responsible for their content and any legal action that might follow. Do you think it's likely that the Biden administration will move in this way?

I would imagine so. I think that Joe Biden kind of you know, his administration really realizes that this is an issue. And I think that, you know, hopefully there will be some big moves made in the U.S. that will hopefully filter over here as well, because at the end of the day, these platforms, they they almost need to change their entire business model because, you know, as I say, we've realized over and over again that the way that they operate now is leading to the destruction of democracies and it's leading to people going down these rabbit holes that are very hard to get people out of.

You know, it's not an easy task to get people, like, out of this way of thinking. So, you know, hopefully there will be moves made in the next year or so. Yeah.

Now, give you an example of, you know, we're listening here to News Talk. If you listen to our program resume, he, you know, was a thinking person. But he says 101 deaths were not recorded yesterday. Mainstream media lies again. People are smarter than the headline writers we can see right through this agenda.

And what Larry's referring to is that 101 deaths were reported yesterday, 83 of them were in January at 18 in the first two days of February. That's the reporting. They have not been reported before. There were new deaths, if you like, that had never been recorded. And therefore, you know, when the hospitals, the nursing homes and so on get their figures in and they're collated, there might be a bit of a delay.

But that's the fact of it. 101 new deaths were reported yesterday, Larry. So that's not distortion. That's, I think, a misunderstanding on your part.

But you can see, you know, Larry, taking a very sensible story has kind of misunderstood it.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I think when you have the idea in your head that the government are doing this on purpose, it's very easy to just let your brain think that's all the time and it's very easy to see that. I mean, that that is what they see when they see headlines. They don't see 101 deaths. They see the government are covering this up in some way. This is not the truth. So you know that that's unfortunately where where these things leads, you know?

And Fiona says all cults will make what they deem to be reasonable arguments for why their belief is the correct one. It's how all religions gather followers. Another one this kind of thing used to be a big joke, but something has gone haywire with the world in the last few years, starting with Trump and Brexit, when people just wanted to burn down the system. And now in the last year, they've really gone off the deep end government need to wake up and do something.

Now, America proves this thing is not a silly fad that will fade away. Another Newstalk listener and says, I wonder, could ever tell us, are the organizers of these conspiracy theories actually believers in their own propaganda, or is it even more sinister that perhaps they don't believe in their own conspiracy theories, but just make them up to get a following?

I would say there's a mixture of both going on there. So there's definitely people that are, you know, conspiracy theories through and through, and they fully believe what they're saying. But there are what you would call bad actors out there who are deliberately putting out disinformation on purpose in order to trick people. And what you find a lot of, you know, that's where you find that where that comes from, sorry, it's from it often tends to be leaders of far right parties are far right activists who are ultimately the people that gain from movements like this, because it pushes people completely away from the kind of, you know, the standards of democracy that we would kind of think about.

And it's, you know, diminishes the trust in the government so much that's that'll push people towards these kind of more extremist political parties.

Yeah, but the point is, you mentioned it's this campaign to get businesses here to open up in the face of the pandemic, that it's a campaign organized online, but organized originally from the UK and with an Irish branch, if you like, here. I mean, is that the. National Party in the UK. Who is it? And do they kind of have any kind of formal organization in this country?

The campaign that I'm talking about specifically, as far as I know, is not being run by a British far right party. It has been run by conspiracy theorists and such. But you couldn't really deem them far right in Ireland. They, you know, the National Party are very, very much involved in promoting a lot of these conspiracy theories. There are pretty well known members of the Irish Freedom Party that have been creating and spreading these conspiracy theories in Ireland so that, you know, they're kind of as much as there is, you know, the the U.K. kind of element of it.

There is a lot of kind of homegrown kind of content out there as well. And as well as that, this is one arm of a massive global movement. I mean, there this is happening in countries all around the world and they are very determined and they are producing content at a rate that, you know, one can keep up with, to be honest. So there's there's just a never ending, you know, amount of content out there for them to consume is actually the disinformation world of the U.S. is not news.

As a news talk texta, the National Enquirer was pushing Conspiracy's for decades, and that's from here. And indeed, it was I mean, you know, aliens from space and all the rest of it. But of course, the online world is so much more immediate and so much more pervasive. Now, here's another one from a listener who seems to think the media's up to all sorts of tricks. John, the media here are going down the same road in relation to covid reporting, not allowing another point of view example yesterday with the reporting of deaths being largely the daily figure, 83 of which were, in fact, in January diverting attention away from the Iraq, this meeting that stated 1500 deaths occurred in nursing homes.

This was the headline that should be reported and the pathetic vaccine rollout to nursing homes. But where have the media focus been on international travel and quarantine?

Typical diversionary tactics, John, if you're a regular listening to this program, you know, that is precisely not the case. And if you listen to any other stuff from yesterday, you know that Tiger Daily was at the Rock, this committee making all those points. It was published.

And by the way, the figures we had were widely published from Nevitt that it was 83 from January and 18 from February. So no one's hiding anything from you, John. It's just that maybe you're not as open to media reporting as you think you are anyway.

Where do we go from here either? I mean, how do we stop?

This is it is the genie out of the bottle and the cat out of the bag. Nothing we can do or or what does government do? What what do mainstream media do to combat this? What do the platforms do? Mm hmm.

As I say, I do still believe that this movement is pretty small in Ireland, which means we do have time to act. I think in the short term, if anyone is looking for advice on how to deal with this, just talk to your friends and family. You know, as I say, the most worrying thing about these movements is the really divisive nature of them and how people become very much disassociated from their lives. So just reach out to friends and family, make sure that they're that they're doing OK.

Pretty much. I mean, you know, the the other thing that, of course, you have to do is always get your news from a reliable source.

You can complain about the media, you know what I mean? People are welcome to complain about certain aspects of the media. But at the end of the day, they operate under a certain, you know, under regulations to ensure the quality and accuracy of the information they're consuming. The media is not lying to you. Get your information from the media instead of from people online who are essentially telling you, you know, their own opinions at the end of the day as well.

Sorry. Yeah, I know as well as that. I was going to say there needs to be a heavy investment in media literacy and online literacy for both adults and children. I think people need to realise that the online world is full of harms, to be honest. And we need to kind of become aware of that. We need to realise how to use social media to our benefit.

Yeah, one of our listeners, Gerry, says this social media thing is like the dumbest kids in the class setting the agenda.

The final thing, the the great replacement theory is that surfaced in Ireland. Yes. The idea that governments all over the world are replacing their native populations with immigrants intentionally, not even the logic of that is quite baffling.

But has that surfaced here yet because it's fundamentally racist anyway?

Oh, yeah. Like that is a white nationalist conspiracy theory, essentially, and it's been going around for a number of years. I mean, it was the the reason for the Christchurch massacre a number of years ago. What's the reason for any amount of mass shootings that you've heard about that have targeted immigrant communities? And yes, it certainly does have that. There is a certain element of it here as well. As I say, I still do believe that those kind of movements are small.

But, yeah, any of those kind of conspiracy theories that are going around the world are here as well.

So I think we yeah, we need to realize that if a Gallaher analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, thank you very much for. Joining us.