Worth reminding people that our 2023 landscape mapping of the Irish mis/disinfo ecosystem found that Gript is (by far) the outlet of choice for conspiracy theorists, racists and science deniers. Do you think this is because they uphold the standards & ethics of journalism? (Spoiler:it is not)

Claims of “election rigging” at polling stations and count centres borrowed directly from the language of the US Stop the Steal movement, despite no evidence of systemic issues in Irish elections.

Conspiracy theories alleging that asylum seekers were fast-tracked citizenship in exchange for votes circulated, based on an edited clip originally posted by the Minister for Justice during the pandemic.

Our analysis highlights the emergence of false and conspiratorial claims alleging widespread “voter harvesting,” “foreign interference,” and “polling station irregularities” in the June elections mirroring rhetoric from the US Stop the Steal movement.

In my experience,geolocation analysis of Twitter data is v unreliable. Firstly,Twitter users can change/choose their location themselves, or mask it using VPNs and other methods. Second, Twitter even says in its help centre that when it cannot resolve a user’s location, it will default it to the US.

A friendly festive reminder that last year I wrote a book about the growing influence of the far-right in Ireland and beyond. Still the perfect stocking filler one year later!

Order here: linktr.ee/aoifegall

ICYMI, we covered the role of Gript in report #3 of Uisce Faoi Thalamh and found that within 7 of the 9 topics analysed, the outlet consistently outperformed all legacy news orgs

Pages 6-7: www.isdglobal.org/isd-publicat...

Actually, here's a pretty graph (from report #3) that shows the popularity of different topics over the time frame analysed. You can see health dominating discussions, unsurprisingly, during the pandemic years, but immigration, Russia/Ukraine, LGBTQ+ and more then filling that space from 2022 on.