Dr. Eileen Culloty:

In terms of The Irish Timesarticle, I do not know all the details of this case, but the important thing is that this is a warning to all media outlets or, indeed, anybody else, engaging with any process like this, that it is liable to be duped. I mentioned earlier that very sophisticated types of hoaxes like this are actually quite common. These might involve having fake LinkedIn profiles, fake histories and lots of faked photographs spread around the Internet to give the impression that somebody is real. There is, therefore, an onus on all of us to be aware of these things.

The point about cause and effect was simply to just not discount all the other reasons involved in people's susceptibility to disinformation or certain narratives. It is not a case of someone seeing a false claim and being duped by it. Other things are usually going on. Similarly, with hate speech, the insidious aspect of this is that over time it is building up and changing people's values and the established norms in respect of what it is acceptable to say. It is not always about the individual instance, but about the cumulative effect over time.