Daily Archives: 9 April 2018

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

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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.

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