It’s a great source of funding, this new alarmism about misinformation. There are seemingly endless amounts of NGOs who need pots of cash supplied on a regular basis so they can keep wringing their hands about the rising threat posed by anyone – usually someone from outside the more advantaged areas – with a smart phone and an account on Telegram who may be sharing opinions which do not fit within the approved narrative.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is just one example. Lavishly funded by everyone from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to George Soros’s Open Society, to the European Commission, to the US State Department, and the British Foreign Office; they pop up regularly on Irish media platforms furrowing their brows and warning all of us innocents about the storm of misinformation – and even disinformation – that is headed our way.
Misinformation is described as information “that is false, misleading or deceptive” and that “is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”. Disinformation has a twist apparently: it’s when misinformation is “distributed with the express purpose of deceiving others”.
ISD seem to largely spend their time scrolling for lunatics on the internet, and then copying and pasting the maddest stuff they can find into long reports, while mastering the difficult task of adding up followers of Facebook pages and Telegram groups who talk about wild stuff like Q-Anon or lizards from space controlling our brains.
(In truth, almost no-one really knows or cares about Q-Anon or the Giant Lizard Overlords, but these notions keep right-wing-watchers in a job so they serve some purpose.)
If you’re wondering, by the way, why Big Government is joining with Big Capital and Mega Foundations to fund the likes of ISD to watch tiny groups of people with the wrong ideas, and to also punch down on working class people who are angry with the system, well, you’re likely part of the horrible far-right because every knows that people who ask impertinent questions have an agenda and must not be condoned.
Then there’s the Hope and Courage Collective (who comes up with these names, Pollyanna’s long lost granddaughter?) which used to be the Far-Right Observatory, which I thinks means that, from their lofty vantage point, everyone they observe with opinions to the right of Pol Pot is a Nazi or something equally terrible.
These groups often seem unbothered by left-wing extremism: no need for concern that anyone who doesn’t baulk at Mao murdering 45 million people, and Lenin liquidating political opponents and issuing vicious hanging orders against peasant farmers, might not actually be full of the milk of human kindness.
But either way, it seems that the lucrative area of misinformation has piqued the attention of those who can spot a cash cow when they see one. And so we have a plethora of media platforms suddenly positing the idea that they are ideally placed to separate the wheat from the chaff and ensure we are all thus properly informed.
Garrett Harte, the former Editor-in Chief of Newstalk, argued in the Irish Independent last week that, in addition to RTÉ, other public broadcasting services – such as local independent media – should be funded by the taxpayer.
It’s actually an interesting idea, but Harte relies heavily in the piece on justifying the spend “to protect against an environment where misinformation and disinformation continues to impact our everyday lives.”
But he then points to the debate around immigration to give weight to his argument:
In recent months, we have witnessed the need for strong public service journalism to investigate orchestrated far-right-led campaigns of misinformation and disinformation on social media in relation to asylum seekers arriving into Ireland from war-torn and oppressive regimes in their home countries. We should not underestimate the impact of the far right on our political landscape.
The effect, in my opinion, is to claim that all asylum seekers arriving here are fleeing war and oppression. But that’s not the case.
It is simply not true that most of those coming to claim asylum from Ireland are arriving from war-torn and oppressive regimes. In fact, as the date from the state body, IPAS, has shown the largest groupings of new arrivals come – in their thousands – mainly from countries like Algeria, Nigeria and Georgia.
As a former editor, Harte will know that Ukrainians coming to Ireland fleeing conflict are not classed by the state as ‘asylum seekers’, they are recognised as coming from a war zone and have been given temporary protection status.
He is referring, then, to those who come seeking international protection. Often described as ‘refugees’ by the media, they are, in fact, claiming asylum – and their claim for refugee status hasn’t been determined legally.
Around 70% of those claiming asylum n Ireland subsequently have their first application refused, perhaps because a great many do not, in fact, come from war-torn countries.
(The deliberate conflation of every applicant for asylum with a refugee is an element of misinformation that the ISD or RTÉ might be interested in examining so they can correctly challenge the talking heads who are spinning the issue on national media platforms at every opportunity.)
The occupancy breakdown produced by IPAS shows the how misleading the widely repeated claim that asylum seekers are “arriving into Ireland from war-torn and oppressive regimes” is
Some 23,753 people are being housed by the state (by the taxpayer) at present (which does not include most of the 90,000 Ukrainians that have arrived). This is an enormous increase from a total of less than 7,000 being houses in June 2021 and the breakdown by nationality shown below is revealing.
More than 9,500 people, for example come from just three countries: Georgia, Nigeria, and Algeria, which are not war-torn. It’s worth looking at the first column of the report, which features the largest numbers of occupants by nationality, as an example: of the 20,749 occupants currently accommodated in housing for asylum seekers less than a quarter, or 23% are from war-torn countries.
As my colleague, Matt Treacy, has pointed out, it is absurd that we are currently providing state-funded accommodation to 35 people from the USA, one of the richest countries in the world, on the basis that they are claiming asylum. The absurdity also applies to the fact that almost 1 in 7 ‘asylum seekers’ – a total of 3,635 people – in IPAS accommodation are from Georgia, a safe country, at a time when the number of homeless Irish people continues is at record levels.
My point is this: if people are calling for state funding to ‘tackle misinformation or disinformation’ then they need to be very careful not to misinform – or only partly inform – people themselves.
And, unfortunately, many of those who have set themselves up as the arbitrators of what is misinformation and what is not, are misinforming people themselves.
One recent example is an article written by Aoife Gallagher of the ISD for The Journal.ie. She accuses those who spoke on Joe Duffy’s Liveline about their concerns regarding the proposed replacement of the word ‘woman’ with a “gender-neutral term” such as ‘person’ in the Maternity Act of being “known anti-trans campaigners.” She is careful not to name anyone, but the slur can therefore be applied to anyone who spoke on the programme, mostly women who are campaigning for women’s rights.
She also claims that 1.7% of all people are intersex, writing that “approximately 1.7% of the world’s population are born intersex – almost equal to the number of people with red hair”.
That’s a widely disputed claim, as Gallagher must know. Trans campaigners rely on a 2002 paper by Fausto-Sterling who equated any “differences of sexual development” (DSDs) with “intersex.”
As evolutionary biologist, Colin Wright, has explained: “while all intersex conditions may be considered DSDs, not all DSDs are necessarily intersex conditions”.
[T]he large majority (88 percent) of Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7 percent figure is taken up by one condition: late-onset adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH). These individuals have completely normal male or female genitalia at birth that align with their sex chromosomes. The sex of these individuals is not ambiguous, so to label LOCAH as an intersex condition is a far cry from what most people and clinicians conceptually envision the term to capture.
When these common DSDs are removed, and intersex conditions are more precisely defined as “conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” Fausto-Sterling’s 1.7 percent figure drops dramatically. According to Sax, “Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling’s estimate of 1.7%.”
Then there’s the ISD claim – also shown to be disputed by Gary Kavanagh of this platform – that only 1 and 2% of people ‘detransition’, that is seek to reverse a transition of their sex from male to female or vice versa.
Interestingly, the ISD made this claim, not in a far corner of the fringe web, but during a “Fighting Fake News” training session in the Houses of the Oireachtas. As we reported:
One of the ISD staff at the event, in response to the claim that “high numbers of people regret transitions and end up detransitioning,” stated “these claims are false. Any data that is around on this subject actually shows that the rates of detransition are very low, between 1 and 2%…no evidence that this is happening.”
But this is not “even close to being true” as Gary Kavanagh wrote.
Whilst detransition is a relatively new subject of research, and research on this area is very much in its infancy, there have been multiple attempts to quantify the percentage of the trans population who will detransition, and multiple studies have put the figure at above 1-2%. This information, by the way, is not difficult to find, even the Wikipedia page on detransition links to at least one study that estimates detransition rates to be as high as 8%.
Then there’s the afore-mentioned Hope and Courage Collective who were also brought into speak before an Oireachtas Committee as the Far Right Observatory where they naturally found time to make a pitch for more ‘resources’ while talking up the threat of the far-right.
At that hearing their representative said that they were worried about those with opinions about refugees and even sex education. There was a sweeping call to ” call the far right what they are: haters, dividers and fascists.”
Again, it raises the question as to why those who are one extreme of contentious national debates should be allowed to decide what constitutes misinformation what and does not.
We don’t know, for example, whether major media stories which were subsequently shown to be false – such as the fake news that Presentation College Carlow had told female students that their leggings were causing male teachers to be sexually distracted by their anatomies – is misinformation or disinformation because those most anxious to carry out ‘fact checks’ seem curiously disinterested in examining these falsities.
The Carlow Pres hysteria was certainly false and misleading, and it went twice around the world, as Swift once predicted, before the truth got its boots on.
There’s a smack of paternalism around all of this, of course, as if the ordinary voter needs the ISD or some bonkers ‘collective’ to tell them what to think – and then there’s the very blatant desire of those with political and financial power to control the narrative and to stifle debate around issues like immigration and transgenderism.
In the wake of the RTÉ debacle, the government likely knows that it may be unpalatable to seek additional funding for media platforms – and they may cling to the justification that such a spend, likely to run into hundreds of millions, is necessary to ‘combat misinformation’.
But to fund those who may also be part of spreading misinformation, or may be focused on their own biases, or to make compromised parties the arbiters of what can and can’t be said would be absolutely unacceptable.