Countering misinformation & disinformation in our communities: power yourself up!
False information is really, *really* unhealthy and, unsurprisingly, it’s infiltrating the public discourse around even the most “no brainer” city changes. There’s now training to power yourself up to help inoculate your community conversations!
Lots of objectively good city stuff is experiencing false information – from the ancient, physics-and-physiology-based concept of 15-minute neighbourhoods, to good-practice traffic count data (though only for cycling, of course, car numbers are never questioned like this).
It’s easy to sigh and shrug, because it’s all pretty distasteful and feels yuk. But as communities, and as a society, we can’t constructively disagree (let alone agree) on important stuff without shared facts. And when we can’t constructively disagree, it’s bad bad news for our society.
The places where we start forming views on things, fed by the views of people we trust or feel kinship with, are – are all really important. It’s the conversations on the local community Facebook group, the family dinner tables, the chat in our knitting circle, school gate, or sports club changing rooms and so on. And we can all play a role in helping them be healthily resilient to misinformation and disinformation – just as we’re helping reduce other kinds of human dorkishness there like casual sexism and racism.
The smart, thoughtful folks at The Workshop, with their specialisms in psychology of communication, have some great new bite-sized training sessions on offer to help power up everyday people! They say:
Over two 90-minute zoom sessions (plus some pre-reading) you’ll learn how to both prepare for inevitable false information (without knowing precisely what it is), and how to manage it when it is out, on social media and in person.
Training #1 led by Marianne Elliott on Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 September 9.30 – 11.00. Training #2 led by Jess Berentson-Shaw on Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 September 9.30 – 11.00
There are five discounted places per training for grassroots activists and advocates working in a volunteer role using voucher code GRASSROOTS. And if you’re a union member or delegate you can access this training free via NZCTU Te Kauae Kaimahi using this booking link.
Further reading:
Great resources from The Disinformation Project
Leave a comment