Dr. Eileen Culloty:

I will respond to Senator O'Reilly's point first and something he mentioned at the end of his contribution about Brexit and the US presidential election in 2016 being two examples of disinformation; they are two examples that are put out a lot. Yes, there was absolutely lots and lots of disinformation around those events but it is a mistake to assume that the disinformation caused the votes. As members will appreciate, as politicians who have to go out and persuade people to vote for them, it is hard to persuade people about anything. It is very hard to persuade people to vote, to change their mind, to vote for a party they did not vote for before and so on. The problem when we simplify what happened in those two countries down to disinformation is that we may neglect lots of other very important things about what was going on with voters that they were so dissatisfied with the EU in one context or the Democratic Party or Hillary Clinton in another. That is not to discount the importance of disinformation but just not to overstate it.

On Deputy Stanton's point about digital natives and vulnerabilities, again I think we tend to assume that young people, because we call them digital natives, are fine and pick things up very quickly. I think people right into middle age might use smartphones and might do online banking but they are not comfortable with it, do not feel knowledgeable about it and probably do feel a bit vulnerable. Just because you can use the skills does not mean you have the knowledge behind them to understand what is going on and how you might be manipulated. Disinformation vulnerabilities vary hugely. That is why there is no formula to say who is vulnerable. We tend to focus on older people a lot. I think one of the reasons for that is that most older people grew up in a world with limited information sources and they knew what they could trust. If somebody sounded like they knew who you were or it sounded like it came from a bank, you could trust that it was. It is very hard to keep pausing and to go back and to remember that you cannot. What we saw with Covid-19, for example, was that it was often much younger people who were more prone to false claims about vaccines because they did not perceive that the virus was as much a threat to them. Older people were far more attuned to the importance of vaccines. It is very situational, and that is what makes it challenging.

I think the reason schools are emphasised so much is that we hope that there will be a generational influence and that, over time, a resilience will be built up in a generation, and it is easy to access schools. In Ireland, though, we have fantastic networks of community groups, charity organisations and even sports organisations that cross generational divides. We are quite strong in that way, so I think there are opportunities there to get out those kinds of media literacy messages and to help people get through it.

On threats to elections, an advantage we have going into the next cycle of elections, which the Electoral Commission will hopefully benefit from, is that lots of other countries are looking at this and developing toolkits for how to protect elections. We can anticipate that there will be things around questioning the integrity of the electoral process or just putting out false information about how you vote, what kind of information is needed and so on. That can be anticipated well in advance and is not just the job of the Electoral Commission; the media has a big role to play there and there is also the case of being a good citizen and making sure that people are not confused.

Were I Taoiseach tomorrow, which is a scary prospect, one thing that would be worth doing is co-ordinating. We were talking about this earlier. Think of the different Departments we mentioned today. There are issues related to defence and foreign affairs as well as education and media. This cuts across so many different Departments so it is a question of how you co-ordinate and bring all that together. One of the reasons these types of issues are a challenge to address is that we tend to have these institutions that were built up before or, rather, we would not start where we are. We can have these fragmented responses so trying to co-ordinate things would be the best way forward.