MSF Listen: A digital platform to monitor health misinformation in the field
While rumours, lies, and propaganda have always existed, the social media environments that allow messages to travel far and wide in a matter of seconds are new. The growing issue of health misinformation became particularly evident during COVID-19, which brought with it a surfeit of false information spread online. Over the same period, disinformation targeting humanitarian organisations also increased in sophistication and scope.
To learn more about how we can tackle misinformation and disinformation targeting our operations, patients, and staff, MSF launched the ‘Tackling the information disorder’ project in early 2020. Initially funded by MSF’s Transformational Investment Capacity (TIC), the project now sits in MSF Operational Center Amsterdam’s (OCA) operational portfolio, after a successful first 24 months.
“Does health misinformation impact the behaviour of a community, or MSF’s reputation? Should we adapt our operations as a result? These are questions that we have been asking ourselves in different ways over the years but since the advent of social media, we saw a need to explore these questions anew at a project level,” says Jake Leyland, Misinformation Project Officer.
Both misinformation and disinformation refer to inaccurate information, shared with various interests and purposes. Misinformation is false information spread without the intent to cause harm, while disinformation is false information spread with the intent to cause harm.
In August 2020, Jake conducted a set of scoping interviews with staff across MSF contexts and profiles to learn what they do with rumours related to health. While many reported how their projects collected and stored these messages in some capacity – excel, word, and paper documents – there was a unanimous sense that projects needed better tracking methods, and a more robust way of building institutional memory when it came to health misinformation.
“These rumours represent community concerns, yet often they were not systematically fed back into MSF operations and community engagement activities. As a result, staff said that many rumours resurfaced again and again. Some staff even discounted the validity of health-related rumours altogether because they were so common.”
To help solve the issue, the team sought out a solution – ‘MSF Listen’.
“The idea behind the MSF Listen was to develop a global MSF online platform where health misinformation and common rumours about MSF can be reported so that we can analyse and triage them in real-time from all MSF contexts. It acts as both an institutional memory with a response history, and a workflow, in which MSF staff can efficiently communicate about, and plan responses to, misinformation that blights their work. The platform could also be used very effectively to collect and triage community feedback, which we hope to start doing this year.”
“The idea behind MSF Listen was to develop a global MSF online platform where health misinformation and common rumours about MSF can be reported so that we can analyse and triage them in real-time from all MSF contexts.”
Pilots of the MSF Listen platform were initiated in Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Somalia in late 2020. In Tajikistan, the pilot showed that there are numerous challenges related to using an English platform to report misinformation in Russian, and the need for the monitoring was minimal, so the pilot ended after a few months. In Afghanistan, the Khost project team used the platform regularly, incorporating its use in health promotion strategy, and gave it strong positive feedback. However, political upheaval and related challenges in the country forced the team to re-prioritize, and they decided to discontinue their use of the platform after the initial pilot.
If the timing was an issue in Afghanistan, the opposite was true in Somalia.
“When we deployed the platform in Somalia, the mission epidemiologist was looking for this type of solution to support the team’s community outreach and health promotion work during COVID-19. They quickly got up to speed with the management of the platform and MSF Listen is now formally incorporated into the annual planning of the Somalia mission.”
After the initial pilots, the platform was also used as a retrospective monitoring tool to store the results of a campaign to combat misinformation related to COVID-19 in Bolivia. As the ‘Tackling the information disorder’ project ended this year, the management of MSF Listen was taken over by MSF UK.
“We also managed to integrate other components of the project into different parts of the MSF movement. For example, MSF India recently created the Disinformation Advisor role, to continue the strategic work on tackling disinformation work that the TIC project had initiated.”
To raise awareness about misinformation and disinformation within the organization and provide MSF teams with a shared language to discuss related issues, a training course focused on combatting the spread of false health information tailored for MSF staff will be made available on TEMBO (MSF’s internal learning platform) later this year.
“Over the past two years, we have learned that the problem with false information campaigns targeting MSF is much larger than we initially thought. While rumours, misinformation, disinformation, and other categories of false information are related, they are also different in nature. We need to develop a common language and understanding of these issues to tackle them together.”
Incorporating community feedback into the design of MSF operations is at the forefront of our strategic objectives. Misinformation reflects the thoughts, feelings, and fears of members of the communities where MSF works. Listening to, understanding, and responding to these messages from the communities is not just a way to stop false information from spreading, but a critical component in a multifaceted approach to working more symbiotically with the communities that MSF serves.