A resource by Jayne Cravens
  via coyotecommunications.com & coyoteboard.com (same web site)

 
Examples of Folklore, Rumors (or Rumours), Urban Myths

& Organized Misinformation Campaigns

Interfering with Development & Aid/Relief Efforts & Elections

Examples of myths interfering with development & AID/relief efforts, elections or society in general:

(if a URL no longer works, try searching for the title on Google, or look at the source code for this page and cut and paste the desired URL into Archive.org)

• Rumors abound about Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV or COVID-19). Rumors are being spread by social media - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tik Tok, you name it -  as well as old-fashioned email. There are rumors that drinking bleach can prevent or kill the virus (that not only doesn't work - in fact, it can kill you). There are messages claiming that spraying alcohol or chlorine all over your body will kill it (it won't). People are circulating recipes for DIY hand sanitizer that actually will NOT work to kill a virus on your hands. People are posting complete falsehoods about various country borders and what their local police are doing. Asian people in countries outside of Asia are reporting that people won't sit next to them on public transportation and make comments as they move, such as, "I don't want to get coronavirus from this person." Honestly, I cannot keep up with all the many, many rumors and misinformation being spread about it.
   
  Here are examples just from Mexico, and similar things have happened all around the world re: COVID-19 rumors:
   
  
  • Volunteer paramedic beaten, attacked with bleach in Guerrero, Mexico (en español)
    The people in the town believed he was spreading coronavirus.
     
  • Inflamed by phoney WhatsApp message, residents attack funeral home workers (en español)
    Residents of Villa Victoria in the state of México blocked the highway between Toluca and Zitácuaro Tuesday and stopped two funeral home workers, who were forced to burn their hearse after false reports on social media said they were trying to kidnap children.
     
  • Covid-19 ‘not serious,’ says Mexican lawmaker; cure is drinking cinnamon tea (en español)
    Virus dies in the throat after drinking the tea, says Sonora Deputy Carlos Navarrete. The remarks came during a meeting with the state’s health commission at which Navarrete urged members to reopen the state because he believes social distancing measures and coronavirus restrictions violate the fundamental rights of Sonorans. The remarks drew outraged responses from the governor’s office and Navarrete’s own party.
     
  • Citizens go on rampage in Chiapas: ‘coronavirus doesn’t exist’ (en español)
    Hundreds of people took to the streets in Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas, Wednesday night after rumors spread on social media that the government was trying to kill them. Around midnight Wednesday and into the early hours of today, residents went on a rampage provoked by false reports that the municipal government was using drones to spray a deadly chemical at residents who do not believe that the coronavirus exists. Angry mobs of citizens armed with sticks and stones looted an Elektra department store and burned down the home of Mayor Amando Trujillo Ancheyta, that of his in-laws, as well as the residence of Chiapas Governor Rutilio Escandón’s elderly mother.
    
   
In the USA, the 45th President of the USA fueled rumors regarding a mythical left-wing terrorist group he calls Antifa. The word "Antifa" is actually short for “anti-fascists.” Right wing groups use the term for any group protesting neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, including Black Lives Matter protestors. Because of his Twitter warnings about the group, repeated by several news agencies that support the President, rumors of an impending Antifa invasion swept through cities across the USA. Police departments say people are phoning in “tips” they see on social media claiming Antifa is sending buses or even planes full of Antifa activists to their area. Here are some examples of these rumors - all untrue - from this article:
 

• An Idaho fleet services business was targeted by a minor panic, after a rumor claimed incoming agitators were targeting the state. One local posted a picture of his bus on Facebook as evidence of the antifa incursion, claiming “this bus was full of them.” This was not true.
   
• Facebook users warned their friends to stay clear of a shopping center in a New Jersey suburb, saying it would be the center of antifa destruction on Tuesday. But police had “no credible information” that antifa would be present in the area, Toms River Police Department media specialist Jillian Messina said in an email. The police aren’t aware of anyone showing up at all, she added.
   
• In Payette County, Idaho — a rural county of 24,000 — calls came into the sheriff after one Facebook user said the sheriff had spotted antifa rioters in the area. The calls didn’t taper off until the sheriff’s office debunked the myth on Facebook.
   
• In Curry County, Oregon, Sheriff John Ward told his department’s Facebook followers, “I got information that three buss [sic] loads of Antifa protestors are making their way” into the county — although he added, “I don’t know if the rumors are true or not.” The rumors were, in fact, not true at all.
• This article from Wired says India, the world's largest democracy, has also become the world's largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror. If "social media platforms hadn’t created the mass delusions of Hindu extremism, they had provided a shockingly efficient infrastructure for their spread. India has 400 million WhatsApp users and 260 million users of Facebook, and it is the largest global market for both platforms." The article notes that WhatsApp helps the efforts of Bajrang Dal, a violent pro-government vigilante group, and that in September 2018, Amit Shah gave a speech to the BJP political party’s social media volunteers and talked about a WhatsApp group that the BJP ran for 3.2 million supporters in Uttar Pradesh. “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public,” he said, “whether sweet or sour, truth or a lie.”
  

• An online, coordinated anti-immigration effort by a coalition of anti-Islam activists, far-right activists and neo-Nazis, and their sympathizers, fueled a sudden, widespread, social campaign of misinformation that successfully steered public opinion against a United Nations migration pact that was YEARS in the making and was meant to address the myriad of human rights and economic issues resulting from the largest immigration crisis the world has ever seen. As a result of the sudden, rapid pressure by the public convinced by the campaign that the pact would result in open, unregulated borders, mainstream European parties dropped their earlier support for the agreement. Activists in Austria played a KEY role driving the campaign against the pact. The Global Compact for Migration was the UN global agreement on a common approach to international migration in all its dimensions. The global compact is non-legally binding - it provided guidelines rather than rules. Its first objective was "to mitigate the adverse drivers and structural factors that hinder people from building and maintaining sustainable livelihoods in their countries of origin," which could have helped reduce the number of economic refugees. 
  

• In 2018, I did a 90-minute presentation on addressing misinformation and "fake news" that can derail government programs, especially public health initiatives, for a delegation from government agencies in Kazakhstan. They were visiting Portland via World Oregon and the State Departments IVLP program. In addition to my sharing these examples from this page, they shared with me one of their own: during some of the outbreaks of meningitis in the country, people have circulated a rumor on social media, particularly WhatsApp, that foreigners are spreading the disease on purpose, via insects infected with the disease. They are fearful that it will lead to a foreigner being harmed - or worse.
  

• This December 2018 opinion piece from The New York Times notes that medical misinformation tends to spread further than truths on the internet — and has very real repercussions: misinformation about the risks of statins, the flu vaccine, the vaccine for human papillomavirus, childhood immunizations, cancer treatments has lead people to not follow medical advice and lead people to get sicker - even die. The author, Haider Warraich, a fellow in heart failure and transplantation at Duke University Medical Center, notes that "To have any chance at winning the information war, physicians and researchers need to weave our science with stories. This is the only way to close the wedge that has opened up between medicine and the masses, and which is now being exploited by merchants of medical misinformation."
  

• In August 2018, two men were murdered - beaten and burned to death - by a mob in the small town of Acatlán in the central Mexican state of Puebla, who gleefully filmed the murders. The mob believed a viral social media message about child abductions and organ thieves. "Ricardo and Alberto Flores's deaths in small-town Mexico were not isolated. Rumours and fake news stories on Facebook and WhatsApp have fomented fatal violence in India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, to name just three. In India, as in Mexico, the technology — WhatsApp is an encrypted private messaging app that lets people send messages to large groups — has upgraded time-old rumours about child abductors for the 21st Century, allowing them to spread faster and farther with less accountability...In the state of Assam in June, in an incident frighteningly similar to that in Acatlán, Abhijit Nath and Nilotpal Das were beaten to death by a mob of 200." That same BBC story also notes, "On 30 August, the day after Ricardo and Alberto died in Acatlán, residents of the town of San Martin Tilcajete in the southern state of Oaxaca attempted to lynch a group of seven men, a group of housepainters, who were falsely accused of being child kidnappers. That day, police officers were able to rescue the men. But the same day, in Tula in central Hidalgo state, the grisly scene from Acatlán repeated itself when two innocent men were accused of being child abductors, beaten, and burned to death. Beyond Mexico, in Ecuador, on 16 October, two men and a woman arrested for allegedly stealing 200 US dollars were killed by a mob after a message circulated on WhatsApp falsely accusing them of being child snatchers. And on 26 October, a mob in Colombia's capital Bogota killed a man who was falsely accused in WhatsApp messages of being linked to the kidnapping of a child." This story with all of these different accounts is part of a series by the BBC on disinformation and fake news - a global problem I've been talking about for oh-so-long... bbc.com/fakenews
  

• In, 2017, in India, in the southern state of Telangana, videos were circulated among villagers that had been staged or edited in a particular way and claimed to show children being abducted by a criminal gang were circulated in more than 400 villages in the southern Indian state of Telangana via WhatsApp and an Indian messaging service called ShareChat. These videos claimed that the children were being abducted in order to harvest their organs. The claims in these videos were completely false. But because so many people believed what they saw in these videos, people stopped going out of night, several completely innocent people were attacked by mobs who accused them of being organ thieves, and at least 25 people were murdered - lynched - falsely accused of being a part of the gang.
  

• Oregon case study: In June 2017, an image was posted to a very popular Facebook group that targeted an Oregon small town in particular. The image claimed to be by a woman who had been to a local grocery store in the town and who, while in the parking lot, was accosted by strangers who wanted to buy her baby. But in this case, the online community immediately rallied to debunk the rumor. I'm offering this case study because I was a part of the online community where this attempt at a misinformation campaign was started, and because I believe it offers a good example of the kind of trust-building before such a situation occurs, and the kind of quick response, that's needed to handle these social media rumors.

• BuzzFeed reported that fake news stories about the 2016 USA Presidential election generated more engagement on Facebook than the top election stories from 19 major news outlets combines – that included major news outlets such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News. These stories played a major role in voting patterns as a result - and more. For instance, according to a story by National Public Radio, a man in Los Angeles created a fake story for one of his many fake sites on how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. Again, this story is NOT TRUE, but many people believed it anyway, and it led to a state representative in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana; a state legislator proposed legislation and outrage based on something that had never happened. It's likely that there was similar issues and influences in the December 2016 referendum in Italy.
  

• Rumors are circulating that the Zika virus is caused by genetically-modified mosquitos (it's not) and that microcephaly is caused by vaccines. Neither rumor is true, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is working to dispel these myths, as they are interfering with effective preventative measures regarding the Zika and interfering with vaccine programs. "Cab drivers, doctors, relatives of the afflicted children, government workers, researchers — all will expound on the rumor, some convinced that it is true, others appalled by its pervasiveness and persistence," according to this PBS article. Distrust of the Brazilian government plays a large role in conversations with those who favor the vaccine theory. Brazilians have long been distrustful of their government, a sentiment that is aided by an economic plunge and a series of corruption scandal that have led to the investigations of many high-profile figures in Brazil, including the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress and the current President.

• Fear and Rumors Fueling the Spread of Ebola. As the death toll rises from the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, confusion and rumor have made it harder for health care workers and government officials to combat the outbreak. MORE Scientists Say Ebola Treatment Research Should Focus on Survivors’ Blood U.N. Ebola Chief Optimistic of Future Drop in Cases Mission Creep? Obama Nearly Doubles U.S. Troops in Iraq NBC News 'Final Word' on Gay Marriage Could Come by June NBC News Saved! Detroit Approved to Set Bankruptcy Plan in Action NBC News In the Liberian town of Bamudu, colleagues of Ingrid Gercama, education manager for the aid agency Africa Development Corps, were chased away by residents, who feared that the agency’s staff would take their infected relatives away for treatment. The Telegraph reported that in Guinea’s capital of Conakry, on August 7 emergency services let a man lie in the street for almost five hours after he collapsed. It wasn’t clear whether he had Ebola. In the afflicted countries some are turning to traditional healers rather than science in a bid to combat the disease - and instead spreading it further. Unscrupulous merchants peddle “Ebola vaccinations” at extortionate rates.

• The Viral Spread Of Ebola Rumors. An article in Forbes that reviews a few rumors about Ebola. "The Malaysian and Rwandan governments have appealed to their citizens not to post speculation about Ebola online, and Vietnam has summonsed four rumor-mongers. The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a warning."
  

• ‘There is no such thing as Ebola’. An article from the Washington Post. As the Ebola virus continues to spread in West Africa, so do the rumors. Some say you can contract Ebola from a motorcycle helmet. Others say you can cure the deadly virus by drinking Nescafé mixed with cocoa and sugar — or with two large onions. Doctors Without Borders has been unable to gain access to some affected areas due to hostility from the people there. Local communities fear outsiders are bringing the virus with them or want to exterminate the infected, since so few who get treatment return alive. "There are a set of beliefs and myths that impede our messages about treatment – it is a huge challenge."
  

• In Africa, Superstitions About Childbirth Endanger Mothers, Babies. An article from Voice of America. “If your enemies find out you are pregnant they will pay a witch to bewitch you. If that happens then I will lose my baby or I will die myself,” says a mother in a township north of Pretoria, explaining why she did not see a doctor until she was seven months pregnant. Not receiving appropriate prenatal care leads to a variety of preventable diseases and disabilities in babies, including transmission of HIV. Also, many women visit traditional healers for herbal concoctions, some of which are harmful to both mother and baby. "I must listen to what the traditional healer says about my baby," says the same mother. "If I don’t do this, the ancestor spirits will be angry with me." 
  

• A website that verifies or dispels some of the Internet’s most pervasive rumors about ANY subject: Emergent.info, founded by researcher Craig Silverman of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. "It presents real rumors and real data about them in a visual format that hopefully helps communicate how a given claim is evolving, and whether media reports confirm, deny or merely report the claim. After enough evidence emerges one way or another, we mark the claim as either true or false."

• The Associated Press reported in February 2014 that Egypt's military leaders have been promoting various electronic devices they claim detect and cure AIDS, hepatitis and other viruses. There has been no published research about the devices whatsoever, and no verification by independent researchers. Despite any evidence of credibility, Egyptian Health Ministry spokesman Mohammed Fathallah said the ministry recognizes the devices as legitimate. Denial of legitimate treatments for HIV and AIDS in other countries has lead to patients ending their medical treatment and, subsequently, dieing prematurely.
  

• In summer 2012, text messages sent via cell phones, threatening retribution for ethnic violence that happened earlier, triggered mass panic and prompted thousands of people to flee cities across India, including Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore, the country's technology and outsourcing hub. As a result, for 15 days, Indians could not send more than five texts at a time.
  

• CNN reported in a story from March 2008 about how census workers in Liberia were chalking numbers on every house, lean-to, hut and shack, and these census preparations had given birth to rumors among many Liberians: that it's part of a military recruitment drive or that it's in preparation for new taxes. Census questions also caused misconceptions: if a census worker asks if a family has a TV or if the children are in school in order to be able to classify the family's economic situation, the family may hide the TV and say their kids are not in school when in fact they are, thinking the government or aid agency will buy them a TV or pay their school fees if they say no. Liberia used a number of activities, from a pop song to billboards, to educate the population and dispel these myths.

• In 2003, a northern Islamic state in Nigeria declared a boycott of a mass polio vaccination program, calling it a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and infertility among Muslims. Such door-to-door drives to inoculate millions of children are critical to stemming a growing polio outbreak spreading. Nigerian officials and aid workers resolved most of the controversy by undertaking a variety of anti-rumor campaigns over two years, including sending Islamic religious leaders to observe a battery of tests on the vaccines in South Africa and India. But the myth continues in other countries: Time magazine quotes Dr. Hamid Jafari of the WHO, in a September 2006 article, as saying that one reason that polio is making a comeback in India is that a small but vocal group of fundamentalist Muslim clerics are spreading the false rumor that polio vaccinations are used by the West to sterilize Muslims. In some areas of India, fatwas have been issued against the vaccine, prompting some Muslim parents to stop health workers from inoculating their children. Misinformation and hostility to vaccination programs in developing countries continues to be a problem.
  

• According to a March 24, 2006 article in the Associated Press, nearly a million census officials are trying to count heads in Northern Africa's most populous nation for the first time in 15 years, but are facing a number of obstacles relating to folklore and local tradition: it's considered bad luck to ask a Yoruba how many children the family has, or a herdsman about his cows or camels. In the mainly Muslim north, men in religious households will not allow women alone to answer the door to male census workers, meaning the women will not be counted. In a bid to diffuse tensions, the government decided not to ask people their religion.

• There are many accounts that in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and other African countries, men have raped virgin girls and even baby girls, believing that sex with a virgin will cure them of AIDS (UNICEF commented on this in August 2006, specifically regarding Zimbabwe). It is a pervasive urban myth that is proving very, very difficult to eradicate.

• Rhinos are threatened with extinction in South Africa and elsewhere to meet the demand by the newly moneyed consumers of China and Vietnam for a bogus cancer cure. Hunters are also driving tigers to extinction for the same belief in medical myths in Asia.

• In a Radio Australia interview, Kym Smithies of the UNDP mission in East Timor said that because there is no local media operating in the country, and no reliable communications infrastructure, rumours run freely, sometimes leading to violence in and around camps for internally-displaced people. "The people are really not getting access to information. You walk around the camps and you see a few people with their little transistor radios trying desperately to get some news. So what we're working on with UNDP and UNICEF is creating a system that will allow for immediate information, dissemination of both news and humanitarian assistance efforts, so that people know that food is going to keep coming to them, that they don't panic. And people panic when they don't have information, that's when you get rioting or when you get looting and fear-driven crime."

• A colleague referred me to his conversation with a senior UN official in east Africa who, when asked about HIV and the gay community there said "but there are no gay Africans".

• Rumors of foreigners coming to steal children to sell them to rich Westerns, to sell their organs, to use them in Satanic rituals or to sexually abuse them has lead to attacks on foreigners in Africa and Latin America. For instance, a rumor that kidnappers were stealing children to use their hearts in satanic rituals motivated a mob that killed a Japanese tourist and a Guatemalan bus driver in a northwestern village in Guatemala, according to a news article in Reuters on May 4, 2000 by Ibon Villelabeitia. A group of Japanese tourists were shopping and taking pictures in the town's colorful market when they were attacked by angry villagers. In October 2007, a group of aid workers, most of them volunteers, were charged with attempting to kidnap a large group of children, with government officials disputing their claim that the children were war orphans and also asserting that the children would be used for organ harvesting and sold to pedophile rings. It must be noted that there is absolutely no evidence that any children anywhere have been kidnapped in order to sell their organs or to use them in any ritual, Satanic or otherwise. Such rumors are based on fears about both organ transplantation and international adoptions, as well as distrust of Westerners.

• Witchcraft and belief in traditional but unsafe tribal practices has been blamed for deaths in the developing world, including in 2007 in Chad refugee camps. At that time, UNHCR reported that refugees from war-torn Central African Republic (CAR) who are living in camps in Chad attacked women refugees they accused of using witchcraft to kill children. Some ill refugees had gone exclusively to the traditional healers in the camps for treatment, and if they succumbed to their illnesses it was often explained as witchcraft. As a result, people had stopped drinking the well water and started getting their water from the swamps and rivers around the camp, creating huge health problems. Seven awareness sessions were organized by UNHCR and its partners to try to end the "vicious circle" that had refugees turning away from modern medicine and sanitary health practices. The sessions did not explore the existence of witches or witchcraft, but instead focused on health, sanitation, community cohesion and the danger of accusing people without evidence.

• The American Dental Association (ADA), World Health Organization (WHO), and many other health organizations recommend fluoridation of municipal water supplies. Advocates of water fluoridation say this is similar to fortifying salt with iodine, milk with vitamin D and orange juice with vitamin C. They say it is an effective way to prevent tooth decay and improve oral health over a lifetime, for both children and adults. If was first introduced in the USA in the late 1940s, but early efforts were dogged by an urban legend declaring it to be a communist conspiracy (this was satirized in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb). Another urban legend says that fluoride is an industrial waste product, and that fluoridation of municipal water supplies is a way to get rid of such.

• A March 25, 2009 article in AFP described efforts by the Egyptian health and interior ministries to quell a rumor that a mobile phone text message was spreading around the country and killing those who received it. (When I was in Afghanistan, this same rumor occurred).

• From Fear and Stigma: An Exploratory Study of AIDS Patient Narratives in China by Jing Jun, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University: "When I stepped out of the clinic in the first village I visited, I was surrounded by a group of local villagers who thought I was a doctor or a government official. A woman in her early 40s asked me if drinking water from a well she shared using with her neighbors could cause her and her children to be infected with HIV. In the second village I visited, I learned from the village chief that his community had lost a major agricultural business. His village used to produce and sell a great quantity of ginger every year. Now longtime wholesale purchasers of his village's ginger stopped sending orders, fearing that the ginger grown in his village contained HIV."

• A development worker wrote to me with his "favorite" examples:
  1. Communities mixing untreated water with the clean water provided by development agencies because 'it tastes better'. "A common phenomenon, but encountered again recently in Somalia."

  2. "The (again) fairly widespread belief that certain diseases are treatable by modern medicine, but others are only amenable to traditional medicine." He noted that Save the Children UK did some research on this in Zanzibar about 15 years ago, and that it was published (still looking for this). "In that case mothers erroneously thought that diarrhea was not a disease that western biomedicine could cure."

• An emergency response team member with a major relief agency wrote to say that the Pan American Journal of Health wrote an article to dispel the myth that dead bodies pose a risk of epidemic and that outlines what risks do exist for those who need to handle bodies.

• Even something as benign as a theater production in support of a development goal can lead to hostilities or even violence, as cited in three examples in Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage: There is an account regarding a youth theater group's visit to a remote village in India, when "the sudden appearance of a handful of English-speaking youth initially created an atmosphere of suspicion in the village. Some thought we were ultra-left extremists, some thought we were foreign spies; others wondered if we were Christian missionaries subtly trying to convert them.". This point is further underscored in the tragic consequences of one community encounter by the Victory Sonqoba Theatre Company (VSTC), founded by Bongani Linda, in South Africa. "When Linda drove his company into KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] for a performance, bullets were shot into their vehicle, killing three of the actors." A TfD activity organized in Dhaka by Save the Children and other local institutions was initially well-received, with local women and girls hoping to create pieces regarding issues of particular concern to them, such as their resentment of early marriage. But later, "the people in the independent Bangladesh NGOs who were hosting our workshop received threats of violence from some of the rich young men in powerful village families. They accused us of undermining the 'cultural values of Bangladesh'."

• As of March 2006, according to a BBC report, the rumor mill was rampant in Iraq: the lack of electricity is blamed not on American incompetence, but Americans wanting to punish Iraqis, and many Iraqis believe that American soldiers wear air-conditioned clothing and have x-ray vision glasses to see through women's clothes.

• According to a reporter on CNN International on November 30, 2007, rumors distributed via text messaging, email and web-based message boards lead to a mob demanding the death of a British female teacher for insulting Islam. The rumors -- all unfounded -- say that the teacher did more than ask her class of seven-year-olds to come up with a name for the class mascot, a teddy bear, as part of a school project, and say she engaged in various activities that insulted the religion and lead to "the pollution of children's mentality."

• I worked in Afghanistan for six months, and I still receive emails from Afghan friends there. One of them forwards emails to several people, including me, regarding warnings or calls for protests, and all of them have been urban legends -- not one has been true. In August 2009, he sent me this:

  In the business area of MID TOWN MAN HATTAN in New York a new BAR is opened in the name of APPLE MECCA which is familiar to KAABA MAKKAH. This bar will be used for supply of Wine and Drinks. The Muslims of New York are pressurizing Government of USA not open this BAR.

  Accompanying this myth is a purported photo of the "bar" -- here's an example. It wasn't true, and the picture is not of anything real. The photo is a doctored image of the Apple Computer store on Fifth Avenue in New York City (which, indeed, has a bar -- a genius bar -- where knowledge, rather than wine and beer, is served). It is a clear block, not a black box, and is not at all a rendering of the holy Ka'ba. But many people forward the message via their phones or computers to all their friends and relatives, and they not only keep the lie alive, they also generate hatred and misunderstanding by Muslims against the West.

• In January 2010, CNN ran a story of how Twitter users spread at least a few myths regarding helping Haiti. One was a myth that several airlines were flying any USA doctors and nurses who wanted to help in Haiti free of charge. Twitter users also circulated a rumor that UPS would ship for free any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti. Neither was true.

• In January 2010, in an outstanding blog entry, "The Anatomy of Multi-Directional Propaganda", Jillian York traces an insidious myth that Israelis are stealing organs in Haiti (they are not). The myth is being spread via Twitter, YouTube and traditional media. York says, "Yet another instance of Twitter spreading misinformation very very quickly... and people believing anything they read in a 140 character sound byte."

• Also in January 2010 was The Ghanaian Earthquake Hoax," as Ethan Zuckerman calls it: Many Ghanaians spent a Sunday night sleeping outside, for fear that a major earthquake would hit Accra. A rumor of an impending Earthquake had spread through cell phone text messages and blogs, and Zuckerman says "it's like a textbook example of how bad information spreads and how hard it can be to contain." Zuckerman noted that radio stations neither confirmed nor denied the rumors in the early morning hours. He said that, according to BBC?s David Amanour, PeaceFM ? one of Accra?s radio stations ? began calling the phone messages a hoax early in the morning, helping calm people?s fears. "Unfortunately, by the time government ministers began taking to the airwaves to calm people, thousands ? perhaps millions ? had left their homes." He quotes this person who was on the scene: "Everyone was just passing on the story they heard via cellphone from ?a friend? or ?my family.?"

• More regarding Haiti in January 2010: Haitian mothers who have not felt in good physical or mental health since the earthquake worry that they will pass their "bad health" to their baby, said Saiko Chiba, a member of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) country support team. When one mother in a Haitian hospital was asked whether she would breastfeed her baby, she shook her head, saying "I am sad. I cannot breastfeed. I will not give her my milk for another six months." From IRIN news.

• Through the summer of 2009 in the USA, a number of bizarre myths were promoted by right-wing politicians, insurance lobbyists and various pundits via public meetings, radio programs and online tools to defeat efforts to reform health care coverage in the USA. Myths included: government "death panels" would decide who would live and who would be allowed to die among those who needed expensive health care (people with disabilities, people with chronic illnesses, the elderly, etc.), government officials would make health care decisions for individuals, the current government-run Medicare program would be abolished, and private health care options would be abolished. None are true, yet millions of Americans believe they are.

• The H1Ni virus outbreak in the USA in 2009 lead to outlandish-yet-widely-believed rumors passed around via political meetings and email, such as one rumor that said the state of Oklahoma had passed a law passed in Oklahoma mandating all citizens to get the H1N1 Vaccination, that would send all those who refused to special camps far from population centers, and that all those receiving the show would have to wear a permanent metal bracelet.

• The USA remains plagued by falsehoods regarding childhood vaccinations, with even some nonprofits and some celebrities advocating via the media and online that parents not inoculate their children against diseases that used to kill millions of kids (before regular vaccinations). Discover Magazine and Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" blog have frequently highlighted these misinformation campaigns, and the illness and death they have caused.
• State Senators of the USA state of Georgia held a meeting in October 2012 to discuss Agenda 21, which they believe is a UN conspiracy to deny private property rights and to forcibly move suburbanites to cities. They believe this will be accomplished by President Obama through a mind-control technique known as Delphi. The national Republican Party platform states that "We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty". The senators' beliefs were discussed in this article in Salon, as well as in this article by Jim Galloway of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Agenda 21 is actually a nonbinding UN agreement aimed at promoting sustainable development and voluntarily activities that could lead to such. It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The "21" refers to the 21st century. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs' Division for Sustainable Development monitors and evaluates progress, nation by nation, towards the adoption of Agenda 21, and makes these reports available to the public on its website. The United States is a signatory country to Agenda 21, but as Agenda 21 is not a treaty, it is in no way binding on the US. More at Wikipedia.
  
  

I blog about examples as well:

urban legends aren't just annoying - they promote hatred

Swine flu & Twitter's power to misinform

Rumors still affecting polio eradication campaigns

rampant misinformation online re: Mumbai

The Internet & public response

And I have my own story: I believed misinformation about vaccines at one point in my life. I share this to show that we're all capable of believing something that isn't true, that I'm not being judgemental about people's intelligence or capabilities when it comes to talking about misinformation.

I'm not interested in just urban legends but, specifically misinformation that interferes with relief or development efforts, or government initiatives. And most especially, I'm interested in ways that such misinformation has been countered successfully. If you have related information or examples, please contact me.

Please see these recommendations on Preventing Folklore, Rumors (or Rumours) and Urban Myths From Interfering with Development and Aid/Relief Efforts, and Government Initiatives.

What I'm also wondering: are their any efforts in developing and transitional countries similar to the myth-busting Straight Dope column by Cecil Adams in the USA? Or truthorfiction.com? Or hoax-slayer.com? Or MythBusters? If you know of such, please contact me.

 
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The art work and material on this site was created and is copyrighted 1996-2020
by Jayne Cravens, all rights reserved
(unless noted otherwise, or the art comes from a link to another web site).