One of the claims made by Patrick in his defense of crowdsourcing:
Fifth, all the humanitarian organizations present during today’s meetings embraced the need for two-way, community-generated information and social media. Yet these same organizations fold there arms and revert to a one-way communication mindset when the issue of crowdsourcing comes up. They forget that they too can generate information in response to rumors and thus counter-act misinformation as soon as it spreads. If the US Embassy can do this in Madagascar using Twitter, why can’t humanitarian organizations do the equivalent? [my emphasis]
I responded:
Is there any evidence at all that the US Embassy’s Twitter feed had any impact at all on the course of events? I mean, I know it made a good headline in external media, but I don’t see how it’s a good example if there’s no actual evidence that it had any impact.
Patrick’s evidence was an assertion that the rumours didn’t spread. I find this to be implausible in the extreme, and I’ll let Jeff Allen explain why:
When the Liberian banks started charging a differential exchange rate (the same as their partner banks were doing in London), that reality-based fact morphed in the street into “the banks don’t take little heads”. The US Embassy put out a press release to try to stop the rumor. It said, “Dollars are dollars, big head or little. Every dollar anywhere on the planet can be exchanged for any other, and they are all dollars.” Which would be true, except it’s not. If you try to bring $10,000 from Liberia and spend them in the US, the odds that you have a counterfeit bill in there someplace are high enough that you’ve probably brought (on average) $9994 instead of the $10000 you thought you did.
In any case, a press release from the embassy certainly wasn’t enough to stop this story. Whether becaused they beleived the rumor, or because they just didn’t want to be the only one not believing it (the musical chairs effect), within a few days the vendors stopped accepting little head notes. This was a few days before payday, and several staff brought the story to me, worried I would pay them in little head notes that they could not spend in the local market. I showed them the newspaper, and told them a dollar is a dollar. They told me, “a dollar I can’t spend isn’t a dollar”.
This is my experience of dealing with rumours in the field. Most of the time, trying to counter them is a waste of time – you just have to work around them. In this case, MSF withdrew all the little head dollars from their financial system, and the problem was solved. Notice that the US embassy press release failed to reassure the market, and I don’t see why a twitter message (or any other web-based tool) would have any greater effect (even if Liberia had better connectivity than it does). This isn’t just a theoretical question, it has serious practical implications:
PS: Think rumors are funny? Managing rumors and knowing when to give up and get out of the way is serious business for humanitarian aid workers. Here’s an article about 3 Red Cross workers killed due to a rumor. My boss didn’t make the decision she made because she’s a nice lady. She decided this wasn’t a rumor that we were going to kill, and we needed to get the heck out of the way of it.
I agree that the humanitarian community needs to improve its communication in the field, particularly with beneficiaries, and that there are a range of tools with which to do so. However we need to be realistic about what those tools can achieve, and in this case recognise that when we feed “facts” into the rumour mill, it won’t stop the rumour mill from grinding – those facts just get all churned up with all the other rumours into a great big tasty rumour pie.
Related posts:
The power of rumors is amazing. I agree completely about working around them as best you can; I haven’t really seen one stopped yet. They fade over time, I guess.
Paul-
Let us not forget OpenStreetMap which is a collection of crowdsourced data!
Cheers,
Jon
Jon – absolutely. I’m not arguing that “crowdsourcing” is a dead end itself, only that it must have limits and that those limits don’t seem to be well-understood or widely-discussed.
Hi All,
Reading your comments, one would think you started spreading the following rumor:
“Patrick thinks that all rumors in humanitarian crises can be stopped and that rumors are really not that important anyway.”
Wow. Clearly, blogs and comments do an equally good job as Jeff’s rumor mill. Very interesting.
You may all have given up on trying to counter rumors, and of course that’s entirely your prerogative, and of course, in many cases, the best you can do is run. Absolutely. And I know just how serious this is. I’m talking about these issues with UNDP/Sudan every day. The latest story is a rumor about international humanitarian workers putting poison in the water of an IDP camp. The result was serious. Who ever said rumors were funny?
But I’m simply not content to say “alright, nothing we can do, nothing to be done.”
I’m far more interested in re-doubling my study of rumors to better understand them, eg., as a dynamic network phenomenon (this should appeal to Paul), in order to try and get insights on how one prevents or mitigates this kind of tipping point. Patterns vs anti-patterns.
Have I quelled the rumor about “Patrick and rumors”?
Unlike Paul, I do think that new ICTs can play a potentially important role compared to traditional press releases, and unlike Paul, I won’t dismiss this potential until much more work has been done on the subject.
Cheers!
Patrick
I only have one question: what about the rest of my comprehensive answer to Paul’s concerns about crowdsourcing in crisis?
Patrick – The internet is a good example of a rumour mill, but I don’t believe that this is qualifies as rumour. I quoted quite clearly from your original post, and you didn’t provide any evidence to support the Madagascar example. In the wider context of crowdsourcing, my point is that in a rumour mill there is limited distinction between fact and rumour, and adding more fact does not lead to less rumour.
“Unlike Paul, I do think that new ICTs can play a potentially important role compared to traditional press releases, and unlike Paul, I won’t dismiss this potential until much more work has been done on the subject.”
In this post I was specifically responding to the example of Twitter, which was the example that you provided. I clearly think ICT plays an important role in public information (as my writing I think makes clear) but I think the proponents of Twitter vastly over-estimate what it actually does, and probably over-estimate what it can do.
My “comprehensive” (aha, cough cough, ahem, tugs at collar) response will post later today or tomorrow…
Wow, this is getting personal. Count me out. And enjoy blogging.
Errr, I’m not sure which part was personal?