The Athlone man whose job is to track online misinformation

When news channels such as CNN and Euronews were looking to explain the role online misinformation played in the upheaval which followed the US Presidential election, one of the people they turned to was Athlone's Ciarán O'Connor.

Ciarán has been working to track online communication among the 'Stop the Steal' groups and other far-right movements that gathered for an attempted insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6.

"Those of us who are working in this disinformation space were shocked, but not surprised, by what happened that day," he says.

"If you were in the kind of places that we cover, you could see that the threat of violence was central to the motivating factors for turning out on January 6. People who turned out in DC that day really saw it as a last stand to defend the Republic."

Ciarán works as a Disinformation Analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank which specialises in monitoring disinformation, extremism and hate online.

It's the sort of job one could scarcely have imagined, say, 15 years ago, but it's now becoming increasingly relevant as online disinformation, false news and propaganda becomes a factor in the lives of more and more people.

Ciarán took up his current role last summer after spending six years working for Storyful, the international news agency established by former RTÉ reporter Mark Little.

On behalf of its clients, large news organisations such as Sky News, Storyful worked to establish the authenticity of video clips and other potentially newsworthy content being shared online.

Ciarán initially looked at online trends and the 'lighter' side of the internet, but he gradually transitioned to focusing on news, and went part-time with Storyful in order to complete a Masters' degree in political communication in Amsterdam.

The rise of Donald Trump, and his election as US President in 2016, led many news organisations to realise that they didn't fully understand emerging trends around the spread of false information online.

Storyful set up a news intelligence team, to track and analyse online disinformation, which Ciarán joined in Dublin after returning from Amsterdam in 2018.

Discussing what this work involved, he says: "If something was going viral on Facebook, and it was denigrating minorities and was being shared by large, right-wing social media accounts, you would try to trace back where the video they're sharing comes from.

"Does it actually show migrants jumping the border, or whatever the case might be? It's about trying to reverse-engineer where a hotly-contested claim or video might have come from.

"You're trying to understand, for example, how a particular hashtag blew up during a Presidential debate, who started it, and what they might be trying to say."

Establishing this, he acknowledges, can be very difficult at times, especially if a claim that's being shared isn't entirely false but involves a grain of truth which has been manipulated or distorted.

"That's some of the most successful misinformation out there, because it plays on people's biases," he says.

"At the moment, with Covid, people feel almost powerless. They see that there's this big thing going on, and then someone comes along on a YouTube video saying there's actually a group of politicians and tech platform owners who are doing this because they want to control the population, or whatever the claim might be.

"It might seem outlandish, but it also offers a sort of solution for people, and that's what makes some of this stuff so hard to monitor or debunk."

In 2019, Ciarán moved to New York City with Storyful, and he was living there when Covid-19 struck.

"I was living in Astoria, Queens, and Queens was the first Covid hotspot within the first US city to become a hotspot, so I was in the centre of it all.

"I was working from home and I was very privileged and lucky - and still am - to have the opportunity to work without much interruption, because so much of my work is online.

"Just before the pandemic kicked off, the last public thing I went to was a showing of Riverdance in New York, just before St Patrick's Day, so that added a nice Irish touch to it!" he laughs.

He ended up returning home last summer - spending his two-week quarantine period in a caravan outside his parents' kitchen window - and changed job to begin his current role with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

One of the effects of the pandemic is that, five and a half months on, he hasn't met any of his work colleagues in person. A move to London might be a possibility at some point, but Ciarán says he's "not even looking past next week right now."

With his current job, his focus continues to be on the role technology plays in spreading disinformation or extremism.

"I think we all saw Donie O'Sullivan, the reporter with CNN, who's done a lot of great work on this in terms of bringing this to a mass audience," he says.

"My work would be a similar kind of beat, where you're tracking the latest thing catching fire within, for example, QAnon conspiracy movements, and how they react to different news events."

Much of his work has been US-focused to date. However, he hopes to also examine some issues closer to home, such as elections in Europe and Covid-19 misinformation in Ireland, in the coming months.

Given that much of the content he examines involves conflict, or divisive subject matter, is it hard to look at it on a daily basis?

"It can be," he replies. "I know that burnout can be a common occurrence for people who work in this space. Vicarious trauma, from watching videos or monitoring extremist communities, is something you have to watch out for.

"The organisation I'm working with now encourages you to step away from the computer if it's too much.

"(You're advised) to go for a walk or get some exercise. I try to go for a run, or a walk or cycle. I practice good mental health as much as I can, and try to switch off, or tune out, when I'm not working."

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'Loved ones going down a conspiracy rabbit hole is a real worry'

People seeing their family members or friends becoming embroiled in the world of conspiracy theories and other misinformation is a genuine concern in a growing number of Irish households, Ciarán acknowledges.

"So many of these people are not extremists. They're not far-right, or anti-immigrant. They are good, ordinary people.

"But the way social media, and social media chat platforms, are set up right now, they allow for the mass sharing of all kinds of material."

He says most WhatsApp or Facebook groups are completely harmless, but some involve "people with their own motivations, their own agendas, who want to take aim at the Government or take aim at (Covid) restrictions.

"Essentially, when people are feeling powerless and vulnerable, as they do in this kind of period, they are very open to being taken advantage of by people who have their own agendas."

He says that if people see someone they know engaging more with conspiracy theories, the most effective way to try to help them is to ask them where the information they're seeing is coming from, who is sending it, and what is their expertise on the subject?

"If you can't see the clear source of a video you're watching then you should have questions over the accuracy of the information," he says.

"Right now, it's so tough to distinguish between what is credible information and what is information with a partisan slant that wants to get you to think one way and stir up frustrations or anger in you."