RightsCon Toronto 2018

Mind the Shark: Informational Flow in Natural Disasters, from Fake News to Rumors

While misinformation has risen to the top of the agenda in journalism, the impact for humanitarian workers has yet to be fully discussed. Misinformation during natural and human disasters is a consistent theme, causing confusion and leading people to miss access to critical resources. Whether that’s the frequent false threat of sharks during hurricanes to confusion about where ICE is detaining people fleeing a disaster site, ensuring information integrity is critical to proper disaster response. What are the challenges and opportunities in this space? How can we design solutions that address this?

This focused conversations aims to look at the specific use cases of address misinformation after disasters, when not even rapid responders may not have access to the most current accurate information. In this group discussion, Meedan’s director of product An Xiao Mina will interview Antonio Martinez of Horizontal and Oliver Farshi and Natasha Jimenez of Outside about their field work and observations in a wide variety of contexts. An will bring her perspective from the misinformation space, drawing on recent research around the dynamics of misinformation, Antonio will discuss Horizontal's work with earthquake relief in Mexico during #Verificado19s, and Olly and Natasha will discuss their perspectives from with various NGOs including IRC, UNHCR, Google.org, and MercyCorps.

We will talk about the following challenges around misinformation:

- The role of television and radio in spreading misinformation
- How to use SMS and other media to directly reach people
- The role of language in creating silos of misinformation
- How to ensure that we are listening to the needs of people in disaster situations to ensure appropriate responses
- The importance of building trust with affected communities to counter misinformation
- How to work with government, companies and civil society

We will sketch out what the ideal workflows and solutions should be, with an eye toward the tools, methods and key stakeholders (government, companies, civil society, and others) that are most relevant to building a robust solution to misinformation during disaster situations.