Joyce Fegan: We need to send out the message of zero-tolerance towards racism

'Social media, where this extreme rhetoric so often begins and festers, is not a place that exactly incubates a sense of shared humanity'

Sharon Ní Bheoláin: 'In recent months, we’ve also seen an increase in extreme rhetoric — suggestions we need to push back against some who have arrived on these shores, as well as disinformation targeting those who have sought refuge.'

Listening to a 94-year-old man, and not a “Gen Z-er”, deftly unpacking social media, and what it has done, and is doing, to debate and democracy is a sobering act in 2023. It’s even more sobering when it’s world-renowned philosopher Noam Chomsky who has zoomed in from America to talk at a festival in Belfast on a Saturday night.

More than 150 books later, on everything from mass media to war, the father of modern linguistics and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a firmer grasp on the dysfunction of social media than most: how it creates echo chambers, even for him; how it’s contributed to a decline in reading; how it’s the main source of news, and a certain kind of information, for many and how it has us at war with each other — online.