For most Irish people who know him at all, the moment they first heard about Eoin Lenihan – a right-wing social media influencer and commentator – was through his disastrous appearance on the Irish Times’ podcast Inside Politics last year.
Lenihan was on to promote his book Vandalising Ireland, and after giving him ample time to expound on the book, its themes and his childhood with little interruption, podcast host Hugh Linehan began to ask about some controversies regarding his previous writing and social media activity. Eoin almost immediately lost the plot, slated Hugh’s integrity and professionalism for daring to ask such questions, and accused him of spreading lies and smears about him. It went on for an extraordinary length of time like that, with Eoin sometimes refusing to answer any further questions while also refusing to end the interview, leaving the host audibly baffled by how to proceed with a man who had evidently decided to place himself in checkmate.
Both during and since the interview, Lenihan has presented it as an ambush meant to assassinate his character based on scurrilous and supposedly “debunked” claims. This was the meat of a complaint he made to the Press Ombudsman, whose decision rejecting the complaint I encourage you to read for yourself. To me, the most striking part was that he told the Press Ombudsman he’d emailed the Irish Times to request they not release the episode, but did not inform the Ombudsman he’d emailed again three minutes later telling them “If you do publish it, publish the whole thing – no edits”, which is exactly what the Irish Times did. I can’t even conceive of telling such an easily disprovable lie, but Eoin Lenihan did it on the public record in a venue where those he was lying about had the opportunity to directly respond.
I want to deal with some other easily disprovable lies of his today: those about his 2019 Quillette article alleging unethical relationships between journalists and antifascist activists, and his subsequent peer-reviewed study of antifascist social networks online. It’s a little complicated to explain, but the lie at the heart of it is both simple and outrageous, and it’s a lie that Lenihan relies on when he goes around threatening to sue people for calling the article bullshit, as he does frequently.
The article in Quillette caused controversy at the time and you can find a lot of critical coverage of it, as well as a handful of defenses. This controversy is when Lenihan first came to my attention and I remember it well as some of the journalists named in it were people whose work I followed closely.
Here’s how Lenihan explains how the article came about in the piece itself:
“…Antifa often receives media coverage that is neutral or even favorable, with its members’ violence either being ignored by reporters or vaguely explained away as a product of right-wing provocation. What’s more, anecdotal evidence has suggested that many of the mainstream reporters who are most active in covering Antifa also tend to enthusiastically amplify Antifa’s claims on social media.
In October 2018, my research partner and I decided to investigate the truth of this impression by using a mix of network mapping and linguistic analysis to see which prominent journalists who covered Antifa also were closely connected to leading Antifa figures on social media. We then inspected the Antifa-related stories these journalists had written.
We created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified Antifa seed accounts. Using a software tool that analyzed the number and nature of connections associated with each individual account, we winnowed the 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts down to 962 accounts. This represents a core group of Twitter users who are connected in overlapping ways to the most influential and widely followed Antifa figures. Of these 962 accounts, 22 were found to be verified—of which 15 were journalists who work regularly with national-level news outlets.
It should be stressed that a journalist’s close social-media engagement with any particular group should not be seen as incriminating per se. Many journalists follow—and even interact with—all manner of figures online, either out of personal curiosity, professional interest, or even as a means of developing sources. In identifying this group of 15 journalists whose engagement with Antifa is especially intense, our goal was not to accuse them of bias out of hand, but rather to identify them for further study, so as to determine if there was any overall correlation between the level of their online engagement with Antifa and the manner by which these journalists treated Antifa in their published journalism.
That correlation turned out to be quite pronounced: Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.”
He then goes on to make various claims about these journalists and their relationship to “Antifa”, none of which I’m going to relitigate because one of the core problems with this article is that, quite simply, the whole business of the social network mapping and the subsequent claims about the journalists have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
It makes some intuitive narrative sense as you’re reading it, but if you stop and think about it, it is trivially obvious that if you wanted to examine whether “mainstream reporters who are most active in covering Antifa also tend to enthusiastically amplify Antifa’s claims on social media”, you’d compile a list of reporters covering “Antifa” and then examine their social media. You wouldn’t build a dataset of highly-connected social media accounts and then only examine the journalists who happen to be in it. All this “methodology” did, if taken seriously, is arbitrarily limit Lenihan to looking at 15 journalists when there were far more than 15 journalists he could have examined if his “methodology” were designed to, like, actually do that.
Nothing in the network mapping data validates his claims about the journalists, and nothing he claims about the journalists relies on the network mapping data. The only purpose of the network mapping data in this piece is to make it seem like there’s some data-driven reason for his choice of targets. It’s a thin veneer of rigour and rationality over what is otherwise a guy making weakly-evidenced allegations of impropriety against journalists he doesn’t like.
Lenihan refused to release the underlying data for anyone else’s examination at the time, and to the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t released it since, even though his stated reason for not releasing the data was that a study based on the data was under peer review.
That study was published a couple of years later, under the title “A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis”.
Back in December, when I was still on X, I shared this criticism of Lenihan’s Quillette article by Jared Holt in the Columbia Journalism Review, along with words to the effect that the sum of his evidence in that Quillette article was who followed who on Twitter. My posts are no longer visible because I deleted my X account a few months later, but Lenihan replied thus:
“Hey Dean, you are wrong. My double blind peer reviewed research in respected Springer Journal Social Network Analysis and Mining is available with full methodology showing that the sum total of my evidence was not who followed who on twitter.
Do you deny that the peer review system is the standard by which we accumulate and test usable knowledge? It is the gold standard – not politically motivated hit pieces by disgruntled friends of Antifa journalists given a byline in CJR.
Aside from the paper you could have accessed before making your claim, there are other rebuttals of that article you shared which you do not link to. So what you are doing is presenting a debunked article as evidence that my research and research abilities are not up to scratch with the aim of impacting my career. That is obviously defamatory.
As a journalist you might want to consider an apology.”
In response to two further (presumably smartarse) replies from me, he also added:
“Very simple. Are you dismissing the peer review system and did you read the methodology before spreading mistruths about my research methods?”
and
“Your constant deflections show you know you are wrong. Be careful with your words. They can get expensive.”
My initial post was made the night before the podcast dropped, and I didn’t know that questioning on this very topic had kicked off Lenihan’s meltdown or that he’d made this exact argument about the peer-reviewed study validating the Quillette article on Inside Politics. I was obviously not cowed by the barely-veiled threat to sue me, but I’ve since seen him repeating the threat to others who aren’t so informed about the fine details of the original controversy and may not understand how frivolous a threat it is. I’m writing this now as a reference point for others, and to call out the deeply unethical dishonesty that Lenihan has engaged in around this study.
Because I have actually read the study, and he is absolutely, unequivocally lying when he says its publication validates the Quillette article.
“A classification of Antifa Twitter accounts based on social network mapping and linguistic analysis” is essentially a pilot study, a preliminary attempt to classify and map the connections between “Antifa” Twitter accounts as proof of concept for future research. The methodology itself is standard for this kind of mapping. Lenihan’s only original contribution is his criteria for classifying Twitter accounts into three groups based on whether and how frequently they posted certain words. The study has nothing to do with journalism or journalists and only mentions the word “journalists” in passing, e.g. while saying the study hopes to be of use to researchers and journalists in the future. It contains nothing even remotely resembling the allegations that Lenihan made against journalists in that Quillette article. It makes no claims about journalists whatsoever, in fact.
And yet, according to Lenihan, this study validates the claims in his Quillette study. He says so very explicitly in the final line of his author bio on the back of Vandalising Ireland, the book he was promoting on the podcast (emphasis mine):
“His peer-reviewed study of Antifa uncovered damning evidence of how Antifa in the US infiltrated the national media and remains the largest empirical study of the group to date.”
There are zero claims, let alone evidence, of “Antifa” infiltration of the US national media in this study, and it is a barefaced lie for Lenihan to claim otherwise. He chose to print this on the back of his book, in his author bio, and then acted like it was an ambush when he was asked about it. Many things about that interview still astound me – it’s the only time I’ve heard an author specifically encourage readers to buy their book on Amazon instead of at their local bookshop – but nothing baffles me more than the fact he was seemingly unprepared to answer questions about something he brags about on the book’s back cover.
It seems very obvious to me the only purpose of getting this study published in a peer-reviewed journal at all was to give Lenihan’s allegations against journalists he disliked an undeserved aura of legitimacy. It is notable that when he responds to people criticising the Quillette article, he doesn’t provide any data from the study, or even a selective screenshot of it. He can’t, because nothing that validates his allegations is contained within it. Instead, he accuses people of doubting the peer-review system itself, as if anything that makes it through peer review is beyond questioning. He hasn’t even done further research in this vein because the research itself was never the point, its publication is just an intellectual status symbol he uses to make himself appear more credible than he deserves.
If the dishonesty involved himself alone, it would be merely embarrassing. But in citing its peer-reviewed status in this way, he is fraudulently appropriating the credibility of the peer reviewers and publisher by falsely claiming they validated the Quillette article when they haven’t done anything of the sort. It’s an outrageous act of intellectual dishonesty, and an unethical abuse of the peer reviewers’ good names that should be considered deeply shameful for a supposed academic.
If Lenihan had an iota of integrity, he would admit to his lies and apologise for them, but in lieu of that, I hope he’ll at least stop threatening people with frivolous defamation suits for thinking his Quillette article is a load of shite.
Left in the Lurch 