You Too Can Learn the Secret Sauce of Disinformation

Wow. It’s been a rough few years for liberal democracies and justice movements. NMAP’s narrative change work takes us all over the globe to tackle all kinds of tough issues, from industrial scale metal mining to government-led defamation campaigns that target activists and NGOs. If we could share a single lesson we’ve learned from our decade of work, it is this: Whether in Brazil, Guatemala, the United States, or Germany, far-right and corporate groups (especially looking at you, fossil fuel industry) use the same playbook to promote and spread the kinds of disinformation that undermine the fight for a more just and healthy world. Everywhere.

While these forces use a consistent and effective strategy to divide, conquer, and pillage, those of us fighting for justice and human rights struggle to keep up with a fragmented strategy that also often fails to understand why and how disinformation works so well.

So we’ve decided to fight back. And we’re starting the fight at RightsCon this year.

We’re leading a hands-on workshop, called Know Thy Enemy, that will put civil society in the disinformation driver’s seat (stay with us here). Participants will be walked through the basics of what goes into creating a successful disinformation campaign—the recipe—before being asked to create a soup-to-nuts campaign that imagines the RightsCon community as the audience they want to sway. The workshop will feature special guests that have key insights into the tactics and tools disinformation campaigners use (e.g. digital platform manipulation, psychological/emotional drivers, and narrative frames).

In becoming disinformation campaigners, our hope is that participants working in human rights walk away with a better understanding of how different narrative frames shape opinions online just how fast disinformation achieves spread and saturation on platforms and why.

Know Thy Enemy is a first step toward our long-term goal of helping civil society create its own “playbook” for countering or neutralizing disinformation and defamation. We’ve already been rolling out elements of this work with individual activists around the world, and our work in the coming years will include collaborations with social scientists, data and media manipulation researchers, and a variety of international groups also working on counter-narrative strategies for human rights.

If you’re planning to attend RightsCon this year, we hope to see you in the disinformation war room. If not, get in touch to see how you can help defeat the disinformation industrial complex.