Threats against T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris and his family<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 including threats to kidnap his young children and multiple bomb threats at their home \u2014 already illustrate an increase in political violence here, she said.<\/p>\n\u201cEverything that happens there resonates here in some way, from an economic collapse to how covid is managed to how social media is mismanaged to political violence.<\/p>\n
\n Things that might have been unthinkable a generation ago are here now, like the recent threats against Simon Harris\n <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really quite staggering to think that that’s where we’re at over here.”<\/p>\n
And despite the wringing of hands, Mr Kirk\u2019s death is unlikely to herald in a new era of greater gun regulation in the US, she said.<\/p>\n
Despite what seemed like \u201cpeak horror\u201d when 20 children and six school staff were massacred by a gunman in Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, gun violence has if anything, increased in the US, Dr Harrington said.<\/p>\n
But now a largely uncontrolled social media is also \u201cin the mix\u201d, ramping up the violence.<\/p>\n
Algorithms promote the most controversial and incendiary rhetoric online.<\/p>\n
And with AI becoming more powerful and prevalent, the opportunity for further destabilisation is even greater.<\/p>\n
And the reality is already “horrendous enough,\u201d Dr Harrington said.<\/p>\n
Videos of Mr Kirk’s murder spread widely across social platforms, including to millions of teenagers across TikTok.<\/p>\n
But tackling social media regulation could be a relatively easy, un-divisive way to calm rabid political divisions and slowly bring communities back together again, Dr Harrington said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the politicians aren’t reining in things like gun control, and they’re not necessarily going to reach across the aisle to talk to each other, there are some more mechanical type solutions.<\/p>\n
\n It’s the big tech companies that are facilitating all of the horror online, not to be blaming them for everything but they have a role because that stuff wasn’t here a generation ago\n <\/p>\n
\u201cYou had to go out and buy a newspaper to get the news, or you had to put on the radio or you might have looked at a website.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you have to actively stop the information coming at you now because we all have our phones pinging in our pockets.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there’s any practical opportunities there for tightening up of the kind of material that gets put out on platforms and you have more stringent age restrictions and content restrictions, I think that perhaps could make it through Congress. Because, to put it bluntly, a piece of tech legislation is more boring for the public, everybody falls asleep. But everybody perks up and focuses when you’re talking about guns.”<\/p>\n
Dr Harrington does have hope for the future. Academics are actively working on ways to bring communities back together by encouraging people to focus on the core human values they share.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome scholars are now working on ideas around finding the common ground. So before anybody starts getting hysterical about abortion or climate, let\u2019s just get really, really pedestrian and go \u2018okay, let’s say anybody with kids wants them to attend a decent school, a safe school. And that their journey to school is straightforward and that they have clean water coming out of the tap and that they have access to reasonable healthcare should they need it’, that kind of thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo just literally boiling it down to a place where even the most polar opposite ideological people can go, \u2018yes, I agree on that point\u2019 and try to thread things together so that you have something going on in the middle.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause there’s been no middle for ages. It’s just empty. The political middle is just a wasteland in recent times.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut there is potential to start knitting together some kind of central political ground again and having conversations whereby everyone doesn’t get hysterical and not have the capacity to listen to an opposing view.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know people who leave the room when they hear an opinion they don’t like now, and these are really educated people. That’s where we’ve gotten to.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Clodagh Harrington, lecturer in American politics at University College Cork, said that people turn to their country\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2334,13477,969,61,60,1634,43,15487],"class_list":{"0":"post-16631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","9":"tag-charlie-kirk","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-media","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-person-simon-harris"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}