Tag Archives: mistrust

I’ve been trying to warn about “fake news” since 2004

Since 2004, I have been gathering and sharing both examples of and recommendations for preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with development and aid/relief efforts and government initiatives. And for years, I felt like the lone voice in the wilderness on this subject. It was almost my master’s thesis project, but while I could find examples of widespread misunderstanding and misinformation campaigns interfering with relief and with relief and development activities, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives, I could not get enough people to go on record to talk about these circumstances and how they were addressing such. For a year, I contacted numerous organizations, particularly organizations promoting women’s health and access to abortion, trying to get them to talk about how these misinformation campaigns were affecting them, but if they replied at all to my emails or phone calls, they said they didn’t want to bring more attention to the problem, even if that attention was in an academic paper that people outside the institution may never read.

I went with another subject for my Master’s project, but I had gathered a lot of publicly-available information, so I shared it all on my web site, and I have kept it updated over the years as my time has allowed. I have always easily found many examples of myths and misinformation creating ongoing misunderstandings among communities and cultures, preventing people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, and cultivating mistrust of people and institutions. I easily have found examples that had lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others for no reason other than something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, to legislators introducing laws to address something that doesn’t exist, and influencing elections, long before such finally got noticed because of Brexit and the USA November 2016 elections.

In my original web pages, I said that this subject was rarely discussed, and for more than a decade, that was the truth: while I could find all of those examples, it was very difficult to find any online resources or published resources outside of academic papers about how to address or prevent misinformation campaigns designed to interfere with a relief or development effort, public health campaign, etc. Where was the practical info on how to deal with this? It was few and far between. For many years, mine was the only web site tracking such.

How did I get interested in this subject? I noticed stories my friends and family told often turned out not to be true, everything from spiders or snake eggs found in a jacket of a friend of a cousin that lives in another state, to why a local store closed, to something they had heard about happening on a TV talk show but hadn’t actually seen themselves. Then, while attending Western Kentucky University for my undergrad degree, I took a very popular class, Urban Folklore 371, where we discussed these stories, how they were spread, how the story changes over time and why such stories are believed. I was hooked on the psychology of rumor-spreading.

When I worked at a United Nations agency from 2001 to 2005, I made a joke to a colleague about the outrageous mythologies about the UN that so many people believed back in the USA – I’m not going to repeat them here, on this blog, but they are easy to find online. She gave me a confused look and said she didn’t know what I was talking about. So I showed her various web sites that promote this misinformation. She stood there, with her mouth open and eyes wide, staring at the outrageous graphics and text. “Is this a joke?” she asked. No, I replied, this is very real. I showed her more. “I can’t believe this!” she said. I explained that we could stand there all day with me showing her these sites, and these were just ones in the USA – I had no idea how many there were based in other countries, in other languages. And I admit I was starting to get angry, because not only did this seasoned UN staff member not know about this, no one I worked with at the UN had ever heard of these myth-spreading web sites. Conspiracy theories, pre-social media, were already affecting our work, yet, I seemed to be the first person to be talking about it, at least at my agency.

We have a saying in English: closing the barn door after the horses are already out. It means you are too late in trying to address an issue. Now, all these many years after trying to sound the alarm, I fear that there are entire generations of people that will now never be convinced that global climate change is real and devasting to communities, particularly to poor communities, or that will never believe that vaccinations do NOT cause autism nor infertility, or that will never believe that condoms can prevent HIV, or that will never accept fluoride in their water because they believe too many outrageous things I can’t even begin to list here, and on and on. I fear these generations are lost forever in having basic scientific literacy. And I fear that if we don’t make a concentrated, sustained effort on educating young people about science and how to evaluate information they are hearing and reading, more people will die, more communities will be devastated, more lives will be shattered.

Also see:

Volunteering & social cohesion in a post Brexit world

social cohesionOn 15 September, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) National Volunteering Forum met in Manchester, England to talk about the potential implications of Brexit for volunteering, and to discuss evidence and real life examples demonstrating the role that volunteering can play in improving social cohesion. The slides from the event are shared online, and the associated tweets, here.

The tweets are SO worth reading, a mix of comments said at the forum and comments from people following online. GREAT questions and comments that will give you pause, because you shouldn’t think of obstacles to social cohesion as just a British phenomena: all over Europe, as well as the USA, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Mexico, and on and on, societies are struggling with divided socio-political landscapes. Emotions are running high, driving nationalist movements and, often, racist and xenophobia movements as well. In many places, neighbors aren’t talking to neighbors because of differences in politics, religion, language, values and more.

As I note in my paper “Internet-mediated Volunteering in the EU: Its history, prevalence, and approaches and how it relates to employability and social inclusion” for the European Commission in 2014, researchers for vInspired, in exploring the contribution of volunteering to employability for young people, found that volunteering contributed to young people’s feeling of social inclusion:

  • Volunteering helped young people to develop their networks and mix with a more diverse social group. It also increased their ability to work within and across authority structures. This suggests that providing volunteering opportunities to a wide range of young people will help to break-down social barriers and lead to greater community cohesion and personal well- being.
  • The positive contribution made by young people to the organisations and communities with which they were involved, helped to overcome the negative stereotypes often applied to them, and improved perceptions of young people amongst adults such as staff, volunteers and service users.
  • Many young people are currently in a precarious economic position with the high level of youth unemployment, and some commentators are warning of a lost generation. Helping young people to stay connected to society and their communities, to develop leadership and employability skills that will shape their future, is one of the most urgent and critical tasks of the next decade.

As I note in that paper, this and other research demonstrates that volunteering can play a crucial role in building the personal resilience and capabilities that young people need to prosper in the work place and in society in general.

However, garnering those benefits from volunteering, as well as using it to encourage social cohesion, multi-cultural understanding, reconciliation, etc., is a tall order giving the current landscape in many countries:

  • War and dire economic circumstances are driving immigration at a historic rate, with desperate people seeking to migrate to more peaceful, prosperous countries, straining resources and emotions of those living in areas immigrants want to travel through or to.
  • Different ethnic, socio-economic and religious groups, among others, are clashing over everything from perceived threats to their culture and values to police relations to access to jobs to perceptions of crime rates and quality of life compared to the past.
  • Certain people are being excluded from participating fully in the societies where they reside, or from receiving the same employment, educational, societal and other benefits others in that society may receive. These people feel they are marginalized, that they have limited access to decision-making bodies, various institutions and employment.
  • Some people’s religious and ethical values clash with public social and working life, where others that have different ethical values also socialize and work. Not everyone embraces ideas of free expression, equality for all humans in all aspects of life (employment, education, marriage, etc.), democracy, non-traditional roles for women, and the value of diversity and inclusiveness. When these people are living in a society that insists on these values, by practice and laws, hostilities can arise, with ideas of tolerance and multicultural understanding clashing with deeply held beliefs and legal practices regarding human rights.
  • Change is rampant and is frightening to many people, particularly when economic situations are fragile, or perceived as such. People are hearing different languages than the one they have grown up with, they are seeing people dressing in a way that’s different than what they believe should be the cultural norm, and technology is rapidly changing employment, education and how services are delivered. The popularity of a restaurant serving food that isn’t perceived as indigenous or is perceived as being from a country local people don’t like, a poster in a church that isn’t in the official or unofficial national language,  a woman not wearing what local people believe she should be wearing – all of these acts can be perceived by a community as a threat to their local culture and values, and lead to hostilities.

The result of all of this is people feeling more and more powerless over the decisions and forces that affect their day to day lives. Fear and uncertainty is sweeping many communities, misinformation is rampant, and everything in the environment feels politicized. Many communities are becoming more segregated, with people choosing to live and socialize with people they perceive as like them in terms of culture and values, and choosing to stay away from festivals, neighborhoods, even restaurants where they believe a different culture prevails.

Can volunteering help bridge divides, increase understanding, reduce hostilities and nurture respect and social cohesion? Certainly there are organizations and researchers that think so:

What’s lacking is research showing that these efforts have, indeed, lead to multi-cultural understanding, a lessening of hostilities, etc. 

In my paper about Internet-mediated volunteering in EU countries, I identified challenges to promoting online volunteering as a pathway to social inclusion, and I believe it is, in fact, the biggest challenge for ANY volunteering as a pathway to social inclusion: resistance to including social inclusion goals into current volunteer engagement at an organization. In other words, most managers of volunteers don’t want to make social inclusion a part of their goals for volunteer engagement. Most organizations that involve volunteers have no stated reason relating to contributing to greater social inclusion for volunteers. They may not see the benefits of adapting their volunteer engagement to contribute to such. They may not have the expertise in how to do this. And they may not have the resources needed to build their expertise to do this. Agencies may resist adapting volunteer engagement schemes to include a social inclusion element, for fear of it draining resources or focus from their primary missions which may have nothing to do with social inclusion. In short: any effort to leverage volunteering as a path to greater social cohesion has to include money to pay for training of those in charge of volunteering engagement at various agencies. Otherwise, such efforts will, every likely, be doomed to failure.

Also see:

Managers of volunteers & resistance to diversity – my blog about comments that are generated when a discussion breaks out about diversifying volunteering ranks.

This lesson plan from the University of Nebraska Extension office, “Engaging Intergenerational Volunteers“, offers practical tips on having volunteers from a variety of age groups working together, as does this how-to guide from Bridges Together.

The Victoria Volunteering Portal (Australia) offers an excellent free guide on encouraging diversity among volunteer ranks.

I also offer my own free guide on Recruiting Local Volunteers To Increase Diversity Among the Ranks.