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, 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.
I'm going to leave these pages 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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