Tag Archives: behavior

Propaganda for good

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I am fascinated with propaganda – information meant, specifically, to encourage a particular way of thinking – and with social engineering, the social science regarding efforts to influence attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale – call it propaganda for good.

Propaganda is communications not just to create awareness, but to persuade, to change minds, and to create advocates. It’s communications for persuasion. These are communications activities undertaken by governments, media, corporations, nonprofits, public health advocates, politicians, religious leaders/associations, terrorist groups, and on and on, and they aren’t automatically bad activities: such messaging has inspired people to wear seat belts even before there were laws requiring such, to not drink and then drive, to engage in activities for sex that prevent HIV, to read to their children, to spay and neuter their pets, to a lessening of intolerance among different groups, and on and on.

I use these techniques myself, to a degree, in trying to get nonprofits and government agencies to embrace virtual volunteering and in recruiting for diversity and in creating welcoming environments for everyone at nonprofit organizations and within government initiatives. I’m not just trying to create awareness about those concepts and practices; I’m trying to create buy-in for them, to break down resistance to them, to get initiatives to embrace them. I’m evangelizing for those concepts.

My fascination with propaganda is why I track how folklore, rumors and urban myths interfere with development and aid/relief efforts, and government initiatives, and how to prevent and address such. That subject was almost my Master’s Degree thesis; I decided the data I’d collected before I abandoned the idea of it being my thesis was too helpful not to publish, and I’ve continued to research this topic and update this resource. And I have attempted to apply my elementary understanding of social engineering in my work, most recently when I drafted Recommendations for UN & UNDP in Ukraine to use Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Other Social Media to Promote Reconciliation, Social Inclusion, & Peace-Building in Ukraine (PDF); it offers considerations and recommendations for social media messaging that promotes reconciliation, social inclusion, and peace-building in Ukraine, and provides ideas for messaging related to promoting tolerance, respect and reconciliation in the country, and messaging to counter bigotry, prejudice, inequality, misperceptions and misconceptions about a particular group of people or different people among Ukrainians as a whole.

My fascination with communications for persuasion, not just awareness, is also why I’m fascinated with the rhetoric in the USA about how Daesh – what most Americans, unfortunately, call ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State – uses social media to persuade. There are few details in the mainstream media and in politicians’ rhetoric on how this is really done – just comments like “He was radicalized by ISIS on Twitter,” which makes it sound like the app is somehow causing people to become terrorists. That’s why I was so happy to find this blog by J.M. Berger, a nonresident fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings and the author of “Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam”. The blog, “How terrorists recruit online (and how to stop it),” provides concrete information on how Daesh uses social media to recruit members – and it sounds a lot like the same techniques various cults have used to recruit members, before social media. The blog also provides concrete ways to counter the message, and how reporters can avoid robotically amplify the Daesh message.

Here’s the manual that Al Qaeda and now ISIS use to brainwash people online, which provides an outstanding summary of what it says – that echoes the aforementioned analysis.

December 28, 2015 addition: in an analysis paper released in early 2015, J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, as part of the The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, answer fundamental questions about how many Twitter users support ISIS, who and where they are, and how they participate in its highly organized online activities. It notes that, in its 2014 tracking of Twitter accounts that support ISIS, 1,575 of them tweeted more than 50 times per day on average, with 545 tweeting more than 150 times per day. “These prolific users—referred to in ISIS social media strategy documents as the mujtahidun (industrious ones)—form the highly engaged core of ISIS’s social media machine. These users may not tweet every day, but when they do, they tweet a lot of content in a very short amount of time. This activity, more than any other, drives the success of ISIS’s efforts to promulgate its message on social media. Short, prolonged bursts of activity cause hashtags to trend, resulting in third-party aggregation and insertion of tweeted content into search results. Prior to the start of Twitter’s aggressive account suspensions, highly organized activity among the mujtahidun—who at one point we may have numbered as many as 3,000, including bots—allowed ISIS to dominate certain hashtags and project its material outside of its own social network to harass and intimidate outsiders, as well as to attract potential recruits.”

And here’s another article I was pleased to find, Fighting ISIS online, talking about the tiny and not-so-effective effort to counter Daesh online, and which notes:

Humera Khan, executive director of Muflehun (Arabic for “those who will be successful”), a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to fighting Islamic extremism, says people like her and (Paul) Dietrich who try such online interventions face daunting math. “The ones who are doing these engagements number only in the tens. That is not sufficient. Just looking at ISIS-supporting social-media accounts—those numbers are several orders of magnitude larger,” says Khan. “In terms of recruiting, ISIS is one of the loudest voices. Their message is sexy, and there is very little effective response out there. Most of the government response isn’t interactive. It’s a one-way broadcast, not a dialogue.”…

Social-media research has shown that messages from friends and peers are more persuasive than general advertising. Other bodies of research show that youth at risk of falling into many kinds of trouble, from drugs to gangs, often benefit from even small interventions by parents, mentors, or peers. But so far, major anti-ISIS programs don’t involve that kinds of outreach.

That emphasis is mine. I find these articles fascinating – and woefully ignored by governments and moderate Muslims in the fight online, and via traditional media, against Daesh.

This article from The Atlantic explores the strategy further: “ISIS is not succeeding because of the strength of its ideas. Instead, it exploits an increasingly networked world to sell its violent and apocalyptic ideology to a microscopic minority—people who are able to discover each other from a distance and organize collective action in ways that were virtually impossible before the rise of the Internet.”

I would love to see moderate, peace-focused Islamic social groups with a good understanding of online communications, like Muflehun, Quranalyzeit and Sisters in Islam, receive grants to hire more staff, train other organizations, and create a MUCH larger, more robust movement on social media with their loving, pro-women, Islamic-based messages. Such tiny organizations are doing a brilliant job of countering extremist messages regarding Islam, and doing it as Muslims and from an Islamic perspective. But they are drowned out by Daesh. Governments also need to not do this.

December 11, 2015 addition:  Mohamed Ahmed, once a typical middle-aged father and gas station manager, is one of many Muslim Minneapolians to do whatever he can to fight extremism in his state. Frustrated by the Islamic State’s stealthy social media campaigns, Mr. Ahmed decided to make a social media campaign of his own. Ahmed has used his own money to produce and develop his website, AverageMohamed.com. On his site, Ahmed creates cartoons and videos so average people can share “logical talking points countering falsehood propagated by extremists.” More about how Minnesota Muslims work to counter extremist propaganda.

The reality is that the Hulk, Smash! strategy will not work to fight terrorist ideology and the violent results of such. Nazism survived the bombing and defeat of Nazi Germany. Bombing cities is not what marginalized the Ku Klux Klan, and bombing cities does not stop people like (and that have supported the ideas of) Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph or Jim Jones. We know what’s work. Let’s fund it and do it.

Index of my own communications advice

Virtue & reputation in the developing world

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womantargetMy Facebook newsfeed is filled with posts from my male Afghan colleagues, talking about their travels, their work, their children, sharing photos, etc. But rare is the post from Afghan women I’ve worked with. And recently, I was reminded yet again of why that is.

In some countries, a woman’s reputation regarding her virtue is every bit as important as food and health care, in terms of prosperity, let alone survival. When you are a girl or a woman in Afghanistan, or many other countries, you can’t just shrug at insults regarding your morals or honor. You do not have that privilege. You have to care deeply about what neighbors and co-workers and, really, what anyone might say about your virtue. Damage to your reputation regarding your virginity, your marriage, your care for your children, your sexuality, how you dress, how you behave in social settings, and everything else that makes up one’s moral character can cost a woman a job, her family, her marriage – even her life.

I was gobsmacked to find out just how true this was when I lived in Afghanistan for six months back in 2007 – my Afghan female co-workers were immobilized at times by fear of gossip about their honor. But it’s not just in that country: I heard a few comments when I lived in Ukraine that made me realize that, to a degree, it can be true there as well.

I was reminded of all this per an article in the Washington Post regarding women in Afghanistan who are being virtually assaulted, their Facebook profiles duped to create a second, fake profile, their friends invited to “friend” that profile, and then come the fake posts boasting of drug use and illicit behavior, attributed to the person being targeted. The identity thieves steal the women’s photos and steal and repost personal information publicly. Or, the woman’s actual account is hacked, the password changed so that she can no longer control the account – and the same tactic used: fake posts boasting of illicit behavior, altered photos of the woman drinking alcohol, etc. “Respectable reputations are demolished with a few keystrokes.” In addition, a woman on Facebook in Afghanistan may end up with an inbox deluged with pornography and violent threats from aggressive suitors and alleged militants. It leaves the women terrified of even their own family members, as the article details.

In the article, an Internet cafe owner talks about his attempts to help the many young women who are devastated to find out their profile has been duped or hacked with such reputation-destroying information and frantic to get the information removed. Sadly, his reports to Facebook aren’t taken seriously. The article says, “He suspects that the threats are so culturally specific — a profile photo showing a woman’s face or a beer Photoshopped into a photo of a female gathering, for example — that they often go unnoticed by Facebook administrators reviewing flagged accounts. What may look like an innocent account in the United States can be full of menacing innuendo to Afghan eyes.”

But there’s another reason that keeps so many women in Afghanistan and other countries off of social media as well: the Tall Poppy Syndrome. People talking about an accomplishment can be seen as bragging, and many feel that tall flower has to be cut down to the same size as all the others. The phrase is particularly popular in Australia, though some people say it isn’t success that offends Australians but, rather, someone that acts superior. But in many places, a woman saying anything on social media, except for praising the deity of her religion, is seen as bragging – and she becomes a target for her “tall” reputation being cut down. If you don’t believe that, search for malala yousafzai criticized on Google.

For all these reasons, many women in Afghanistan and other countries have given up on having a virtual identity at all – I personally know of two such women. This greatly hinders their ability to connect with potential colleagues abroad that could help them in their work, to build up a professional reputation beyond the walls of their office or beyond the staff of the organization, and build a career.

Of course, it hasn’t always been so easy in the Western world for a woman to shrug off gossip. In Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, warns her father that the consequences of her sister Lydia’s reputation as a flirt affects “our importance, our respectability in the world”, noting that when a girl is perceived as being a flirt, it is the girl’s family members that pay the price: “Oh! my dear father, can you suppose it possible that they will not be censured and despised wherever they are known, and that their sisters will not be often involved in the disgrace?” 200 years later, no girl in the USA has to have that scene explained to her, even in our world of celebrity sex tapes and leaked nude photos and wardrobe malfunctions. Many women worldwide, even in “the West,” still fear loss of reputation through gossip, even if the consequences aren’t nearly as dire as in other countries.

By contrast, I now live in a privileged world where I can choose to shrug at personal insults thrown my way regarding my virtue, my moral behavior, etc. I know who I am, that I strive for integrity in my professional world and in personal matters, I know that the people I love and respect in my life know my true character and morals, and for me, that’s all that matters. If someone calls me a whore, I can simply roll my eyes and say, “Please call me Her Royal Highness and Whore, as it is my correct title,” and then I can go on about my day.

I’m from the Bible belt, and I’ve lived all over the USA, and I find that “but what will people think?!” is a mentality that still very much exists back home. I’m not sure when exactly I shed that mentality, but I do remember the first time I heard a story that says there was a man who constantly harassed and insulted the Buddha, but the Buddha never seemed fazed by it. When someone asked why he didn’t take offense to the insults, he replied, “If someone gives you a gift and you refuse to accept it, the gift stays with the giver.” I remember thinking: that’s what I want to strive for. Though, full disclosure: insults about my looks, my age, my weight, etc., still feel like punches in my gut, anc criticism of my work, and my approach to work, can sting. But insults about my virtue? Have at it – I don’t care.

So we, in the West, do understand, to a degree, the perils of gossip regarding moral behavior for our sisters in other countries. But what’s to be done? We certainly need to pressure social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to better respond to complaints of duping and hacking. But should we also encourage a new way of thinking: “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me”? I’m not sure it’s possible to become unoffendable – but could an entire culture be taught, deliberately, to become less so? Would that be a part of women’s empowerment, of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly #5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls?

Regardless, it should serve as a caution to humanitarian and development workers wanting NGOs and government agencies to engage more on social media; you need to provide guidance for the women who would be expected to manage online activities on how to stay safe and protect their personal reputations.

January 4, 2016 update: See this post on TechSoup that summarizes an article about the risks taken by women in Pakistan, particularly female students, who use social media, and highlights the work of Nighat Dad, a lawyer in Pakistan who works to help women stay safe online.

Also consider this real-world example: The book Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez chronicled her time running a beauty school in Kabul, where she trained and managed Afghan beauticians. The book ended up on The New York Times bestseller list, made an overnight sensation of Rodriguez, and was slated to become a movie, with Sandra Bullock playing the lead. But then her Afghan husband turned on her, demanding proceeds from the book. Other people showed up at the beauty school, demanding money from the women that worked there and threatening to bring dishonor to their families by showing photos Rodriguez had taken with her cell phone inside the shop of women behaving in an “un-Islamic” manner – photoss that, at the time of this blog, can still be found online. The book and those photos exposed the women to risks. Several of the Afghan women who worked at the beauty school and whose private lives she documents in her book went into hiding and applied for political asylum within the United States. They feel abandoned by Rodriguez. In an article a year after fleeing Afghanistan, she said “If I could give them what they want, I would. I don’t know how to help anymore.” The fate of the women remains unknown. Photos and stories shared in moments of joy, fun and sisterhood have ended up the very people she was trying to help.

Update April 16, 2019: The Kandahar field office of UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) hosted a discussion with 20 women representatives of civil society, local media, provincial council members, teachers and university students active on social media. The participants agreed that social media campaigns and platforms are important means of advocacy for women to play their role in peace process. Balancing the pros with the cons -such as risks of harassment from trolls and others- they created a closed social media group dedicated to empowering women. In southern Afghanistan, as in other parts of the country, women are largely left out of decision-making and peace processes. Gender-based violence is prevalent and women are not visible in many public domains because of family and other cultural restrictions. The limitations apply to social media as well with indicators showing that, despite the potential, very few women in the southern region are active in this sphere. See more via this UNAMA Facebook update.

Updated April 15, 2021: A comic strip demonstrates the challenges women face online. It’s developed by Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet). In a story of three differently aged, differently shaped and differently employed women, we see what violence can look like online, how the seemingly harmless can actually contribute to it, and what we can all do to prevent it and to create a safer space for women online.

Also see:

Why You SHOULD Separate Your Personal Life & Professional Life Online

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This blog by Rosetta Thurman says you can’t separate your public and private lives online.

She’s wrong.

You can separate your public and private lives online – at least as much as you can offline. And, quite frankly, you should! She says it’s not cool to be two different people online. The reality is that, offline, you are at least two different people – and, in fact, you are probably a dozen different people. Offline, you already compartmentalize your life with regards to what information you share with others and what you do around certain people:

  • When you are with certain friends, you may talk mostly about sports, and when you are with different friends, you may talk about politics.
  • When you are at work, you might never bring up that you dress up for Renaissance faires.
  • There are people in your life that do not want to hear about your work. They either find it uninteresting or boring or too complicated to understand. So you don’t talk about your work with them. It’s not that your work is secret – it’s just not something you talk about with everyone.
  • When you are around your grandmother, you probably don’t use some of the colorful language you freely use with friends at a bar.

All those offline conversations and activities aren’t secret: it’s quite possible a co-worker is going to show up at a Renaissance faire and see you in costume. You may go to a conference and the speaker may turn out to be your socccer team coach, whom you had no idea was a lawyer specializing in risk management. But even when these worlds collide, they usually stay separate after the fact: your co-worker may greet you with “Forsooth, friend!” for a few weeks, you may be tempted to ask your soccer coach some legal questions after a game, but eventually, everyone will retreat to the roles in which they feel most comfortable.

Online, it’s no different:

  • You may have two Twitter accounts, one for your professional activities and one for your Star Trek convention activities. One account might allow anyone to see your tweets, even if they don’t follow you, and the other may require all followers to be approved.
  • On Facebook, you may have all of your Facebook friends in different lists (or, on GooglePlus, you may have all of your connections in different circles), and every time you post, you might include or exclude certain people or lists – you may target sports talk about your alma mater with other alumni, you may share your baby photos only with family, and you may exclude your in-laws from any of your political rants.
  • You may decide your Facebook account is only for real friends – that means you might be a LinkedIn connection of someone, but when you find that person on Facebook and try to connect, the person may refuse the connection. I’ve turned down friend requests from people on social networks I use primarily for personal reasons, and I’ve been turned down a few times by professional colleagues, who say that their Facebook account is to talk to family and close friends, not people they work with.
  • You may hide people you’ve friended online from your Facebook newsfeed, because you are fed up with all the cat photos or daily affirmations. You can still see news about them if you go to their pages, but you decide you really don’t need their religious comments daily.

The point: you are already being different people online – and you should be, just as you are offline!

Could a diligent person find absolutely everything you do online, despite these efforts and despite your online privacy settings? Absolutely! But outside of a stalker, that’s probably not going to happen; most of your professional colleagues will never know about your Lt. Uhura costume, because they aren’t ever going to stumble upon the Twitter feed you use specifically to talk about that. You aren’t going to bore your soccer teammates with online talk about the professional conference you attended, because they are going to unfriend you on Facebook if that’s all you’re going to talk about.

So, yes, you can separate your public and private lives online – at least as much as you can offline. And you should separate your public and private lives online, at least to a degree, just as you do offline, because not everyone wants to hear absolutely everything about you. Here’s how you do that:

  • Think of everything you post online as publishing. You are producing a publication – the same as a newsletter, a flier, a newspaper, a pamphlet, a holiday letter to friends, etc. – every time you create an online account and start posting information. When you post online, you should be thinking about who the audience is for that publication – you don’t write exactly the same letter to your grandmother than you do your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, do you? Then why try to have a one-size-fits-all message every time you post online?
  • If you associate or use your work email to create a social media account, then that account is part of your job, period. In fact, your company may require you to give up that account when you leave the company, since you associated it with your work email. If you want to use a social media account and not always be talking as an employee of a company, use a personal email to create or associate with that account.
  • You may say no to Facebook friends or Twitter followers. You have that right. Just always have an alternative to offer someone. For instance, I use LinkedIn to link to people I have worked with or whose work I am familiar with. Period. I do not link to people I haven’t worked with or whose work I am not familiar with – if I did, then LinkedIn would become a meaningless phone book. When someone I don’t know wants to friend me on LinkedIn, I encourage them to, instead, like my Facebook page.
  • If Facebook seems to be the place where all of the online activities of your personal friends, family and co-workers are intersecting – it’s the primary place you are interacting with people from all of those groups – then get all your contacts into lists, and be mindful every time you post. Should a political rant go to everyone, or should you exclude anyone you have coded as a co-worker? It’s a courtesy to not bombard your professional colleagues with baby photos, or to bombard your family and friends with your latest conference slideshow presentations, offline as well as on!
  • Consider creating a Facebook page for your professional life, rather than friending co-workers on Facebook. A page is different than a profile: with a page, anyone can “like” your page, but people that like your page can see only what you post to that page, as opposed to seeing what you share on your profile timeline (if you have set your privacy settings so that no friends can see that content).
  • Share personal things with your professional colleagues online via the online profile you’ve chosen primarily for professional activities only as much as you would offline in the office: would you pass around vacation photos at lunch? Would you invite all of your co-workers to your daughter’s wedding? Would you talk about the Renaissance faire in the break room? Would you tell your office mates about your new drummer boyfriend? It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share personal things with professional colleagues and clients – I know that sharing my photos from my motorcycle trips has gone over quite well with co-workers and clients, and perhaps even contributed to their image of me as adventurous and outgoing (hence why I don’t share photos of myself in sweat pants, watching “Buffy” marathons, which is something I do as much, if not more, than motorcycle trips).

Can it get messy, can boundaries get blurred? Of course, just like it can offline when you’re rocking out at a concert and look over to see one of your clients in the audience, spell bound by your dancing abilities. Even if you aren’t violating any policies or doing anything illegal, your offline actions can have consequences. That’s life. A board member at a nonprofit where you volunteer may get angry at seeing you on the front page of the newspaper participating in a demonstration against something he or she supports – or seeing that you “liked” a political candidate on an online social network that he or she opposes. If you are not a spokesperson at your organization, and there’s no written policy against employees expressing political beliefs outside of the office, you should be as fine in the eyes of the organization regarding what you do online as what you do off.

Should you keep professional activities and personal activities absolutely, completely segregated? Of course NOT – clients, co-workers, and even potential employers, want to see some of your personality. Sharing photos from my personal life built a lot of bridges with my co-workers in Afghanistan once-upon-a-time.

What about creating accounts using pseudonyms? Or should you keep certain things about yourself off the Internet entirely? There is nothing at all unethical about this in certain circumstances: perhaps you are on a private online group for victims of domestic violence, because you are one yourself. Or you are an aid / humanitarian worker that visits ultra-conservative regions and would be in danger if people there knew you were gay. Perhaps you are a teacher that also writes fan fiction, and you aren’t sure all of the parents of your students would be able to separate you as a teacher from you as an author. In those cases, you have every right to use a pseudonym for certain online activities, or to not share certain information online at all.

Type your name into Google or Bing a couple of times a year and see what comes up – are you comfortable with an employer, or potential employer, or your neighbor, seeing the first 10 links to your name? If not, then start thinking more deliberately about your online behavior.

In short: once again, offline rules apply online. Be as mindful and deliberate online about information sharing as you are offline, tell the truth, just as you would in any printed publication, and you won’t worry about your integrity or image. And please – keep your online activities separate so I don’t have to see your baby’s potty training.

Sound off re employees & volunteers appropriate behavior online

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I found this article today: How to Handle an Employee’s Controversial Online Behavior – it’s from 2010, but it still works – the graphic is awesome!

I also have my own thoughts on the subject: How to Handle Online Criticism, written especially for nonprofits, NGOs and other mission-based organizations.

On a related note, there are three threads on TechSoup regarding social media that so beg your participation:

Social Media Policies in the Workplace

Instant Messaging policy

Reporting to an Executive Director re social media

Would love to read more comments on these TechSoup threads! How does your nonprofit, government agency, charity, non-governmental agency or other mission-based organization handle all of these various aspects of social media/online activities?