Widespread misunderstanding and myth-spreading is especially insidious in how it interferes with community initiatives, public health campaigns, elections and more. It was rarely discussed back in the 1990s, when I first tried to talk about it, in relation to women's reproductive health, and it was still not considered much of an issue for almost 20 years after I was trying to talk about it. But around 2014, it became a pandemic, and now, it's a plague that affects every person on Earth in some way. With fake news sites set up specifically to mislead people, as well as crowdsourced efforts by professional online provocateurs and automated troll bots pumping out thousands of comments, countering misinformation efforts has to be a priority for aid and development organizations, as well as government agencies. And now we have artificial intelligence being used to create fake photos and on-the-scene videos, making an already-overwhelming problem seem insurmountable.
Folklore, rumors (or rumours) and urban myths / urban legends, as well as organized misinformation campaigns and "fake news", greatly, profoundly interfere with relief and development activities, community initiatives, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives -- to the point of bringing such to a grinding halt. Anyone who is paying attention has seen campaigns succeed in misleading people in everything from what's taught in classrooms to land purchases to what immigrants eat to what happens when a woman menstruates.
These campaigns are creating ongoing misunderstandings among
communities and cultures, preventing people from seeking help,
encouraging people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous
practices, cultivating mistrust of people and institutions, have
even 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, motivated legislators to introduce laws to address
something that doesn't exist, and influenced elections, creating
bloodless coups and installing into powerful dangerous people bent
on curbing human rights and destroying all opposition.
I spent about 20 years researching and writing about misinformation campaigns meant to derail community health initiatives. I started in the late 1990s and kept on through about 2022, into the COVID pandemic.
I've stopped that research around 2022, because I'm semi-retired, I'm unfunded for this work, and quite frankly, I'm overwhelmed with the onslaught of misinformation now. As someone who has been watching this since the early days of Internet mainstreaming - whose early materials talked about how fax machines were used to spread misinformation - I am utterly overpowered. My advice is still good - but so much more needs to be done.
I'm going to leave these pages of my earlier advice up, because I
think there's still worthwhile resources here, for those who are
going to continue the fight. And maybe there is an academic out
there who could use them for a research paper.
In 2004, I started gathering and sharing both examples of this phenomena, and recommendations on preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with development and aid/relief efforts and government initiatives to share online. I did this entirely on my own, as a volunteer, with no funding from anyone, and feeling very alone as I tried to both sound the alarm and offer meaningful solutions - so few other folks were looking into this when I started. Here's what I found in my 20 years or so of research:
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