Recent attacks on Indian citizens have rightly sparked outrage and soul-searching across Ireland. As Garda Commissioner Drew Harris confirmed, racism is a real and active factor in these crimes, alongside criminality and the targeting of vulnerable people. But to fight racism effectively, we must also acknowledge a newer, insidious force: the manipulation of public consciousness by networks of fake and bot accounts on social media.
Social Media’s Amplification Machine
When someone targets someone for hate or attacks them based on their race, sexuality or something similar, it’s powered by hate. In the recent attacks on Indians in Ireland, it’s absolutely undeniable that these have been hate crimes driven by racism.
The point I want to make is the dangers of oversimplifying the issue to racists being racist. I spend far too much time on social media, and I see racism, sexism, homophobia, body shaming and much much more on a daily basis. Earlier this year, I carried out an investigation into how TikTok handles this kind of content, resulting in the platform removing multiple examples of inappropriate content moderation teams missed.
Since then, TikTok has moved towards AI-powered moderation and through spot checks, I can see that casual racism and general hate is going unchecked, ignoring many policies that TikTok itself has laid out.
A recente RTÉ investigation found that bot-like accounts, often based outside Ireland, were behind hundreds of thousands of posts promoting xenophobic hashtags like #IrelandBelongsToTheIrish.
These weren’t just echoing hate, they were systematically encouraging protests, boosting conspiracy theories, and creating a climate where racism feels more “normal” and visible than it likely is in real life.
Fakery Breeds the Zeitgeist
Here’s why this matters. The manipulative effect of these bots isn’t just quantity. It’s psychological. When people see racist or hateful content appearing everywhere, shared, commented on, and apparently endorsed by “many”, it starts to feel like public consensus, or the zeitgeist. This manufactured normality emboldens those who might otherwise hide their prejudice, making overt racism seem more permissible and common. It then becomes a sort of pyramid scheme, where new racists are born where previously they wouldn’t have been exposed to an engineered “acceptable racist ideology”.
This misinformation and racism is often spread by bot accounts aren’t even from within Irelan, they’re seeded and amplified by actors abroad, with polarising political motives. When protests, largely driven by far right minorities posing as “concerned citizens”, many of the same faces appear, regardless of where the protest is. This gives the feeling that every corner of Ireland has growing numbers of the population concerned with immigration, when the reality is it’s a traveling bandwagon of people drumming up hate.
Numerous studies have found that while racism absolutely exists, its perceived prevalence, intensity, and everydayness are being drastically amplified by social media. Internationally and in Ireland, far-right and hate-driven networks, many not even based locally, are using automated bot accounts to flood platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook with divisive, racist narratives.
The Algorithmic Trap
Why are bots so powerful? Because social media is built on algorithms that reward outrage and engagement. Racist posts and misinformation drive clicks, shares, and heated replies. They travel faster and appear more frequently in our feeds. The result is a distorted mirror, where fringe views appear mainstream, and hate seems everywhere.
None of this is new. This is the same style of fast moving information and misinformation that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
But I feel it’s important to draw attention to this wider issue of social media instead of just saying “there are racists amongst us”. I’ve witnessed first hand how quickly a social media post, powered by bot engagement and boosted reach, can make someone believe something untrue before having to correct them. Amazingly, they are less likely to believe the person right in front of them, than the content they’ve seen online.
Racism is real and absolutely present in Ireland, alongside lots of other hate directly and minority and vulnerable groups. And our heads needs to come out of the sand on how much social media is playing a massive role is platforming that hate.
