Mr. Rory Harte:

The language that is being used right now is around resources in Palestine, that it is purely genocidal and has nothing to do with the hostage situation. The language is very much that this is purely violent. This is stuff that many of us understand to be the case nonetheless, but that does come from disinformation narratives that are coming from databases out there. There is foreign information manipulation and interference, FIMI, from certain countries, whether Russia or other countries, speaking to Israel just being in this for the resources or that it is about killing Gazans or Palestinians and nothing else. This is the language we are taking. As Ms O'Connell stated, we are strictly non-partisan. We do not put any sort of value judgment across any of that, but this is the language we are noting coming up and this is how it is shaping the discourse in Ireland. It adds to the discourse becoming very coarse and polarised.

The Deputy will excuse me if that point bleeds into my response to his question on the role of education. There are several important matters to address in that regard. When we in EM Ireland talk about the broader information ecosystem and supporting it to be healthy, there are a few traditional approaches to take. One of them is debunking. That is where a person reads something online and I rock up and tell the person he or she is wrong. There is also prebunking, however. Prebunking is the idea of having that information out there in the first place in order that those who might come across false information later are better informed. Prebunking works a little better than debunking. I am wearing my psychologist's hat on this one. Much of our sense of self and how we understand information at this stage is very binary and polarised and it is built around our identity. The information people digest contributes to their sense of self. If I tell those people that information is wrong, it is an attack on their sense of self and they retreat a little back into themselves. At one end of the scale, people can become defensive. It can go further, to people becoming red-pilled or black-pilled, as it is known, where they become very reactionary and end up on the right. That sort of debunking can have a counter-intuitive result and add to that polarisation.

The Deputy referred to liberal students becoming one end and Hillary Clinton talking about the "deplorables". There has been very interesting research coming out of NYU recently about how, in the context of the idea of a polarised community, a person who holds certain beliefs and identifies in a particular way is, as part of that group identity, more likely and willing to believe stuff that he or she understands is not 100% accurate. That is a pathway to believing one thing because you believe something else. It is all tied into identity. It is very difficult to tell people who are polarised that they are wrong because it is part of who they are.