How refugees are creatively countering misinformation
Created by refugee volunteers in Bulgaria, a website separates fact from fiction.
By Amy Lynn Smith — Independent Writer + Strategist
The truth of life for refugees is challenging enough without the damage of falsehoods. What’s more, refugees often don’t have reliable access to information, and much of it may be in a language they don’t understand yet. That makes it easy for misinformation to spread quickly among refugee and host communities. This can spark a reluctance among refugees to trust institutions or access necessary services, drive fear of retaliation, and more. But a group of refugee volunteers brought together by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is working to change all that.
To fully understand the initiative means looking back to 2019, when UNHCR Bulgaria decided to establish a Refugee Advisory Board. According to Emiliya Bratanova van Harten, an Integration Associate in Bulgaria, UNHCR has been placing an increased emphasis on community-based protection — being more accountable to affected populations. But perhaps even more important, UNHCR aims to increase the level of involvement refugees have in decision-making that impacts their lives.
“Through the years we’ve had different activities and it’s always evolving, from the lowest level being informing to the highest level being empowering refugees,” says van Harten, who oversees this empowerment-promoting project. “Why not have refugees as equal partners at the decision-making table? We have tried many different activities in this regard, and the process taught us how important it is to train refugees for the task.”
At the end of 2019, UNHCR Bulgaria received internal funding for community-based projects. The original idea was to set up a refugee consultative body, which became the Refugee Advisory Board. Officially launched in 2020, the Board now includes 11 refugees and asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen. UNHCR worked with an outside expert, Anila Noor, to develop the methodology, the selection of participants, and the promotion of the idea.
Unfortunately, by the time the Refugee Advisory Board was fully established, it was early 2020, the beginning of the COVID lockdown. According to van Harten, this put limits on what the Board was able to accomplish. However, Board members received extensive training on various topics, such as the asylum context in Bulgaria, integration protection policies, team building, leadership, advocacy, and communication and presentation skills.
What’s more, the lockdown created an opportunity to think creatively, inspiring an idea that could be conducted remotely: a community-led online misinformation and rumor management campaign called “They said that….” Toward the end of 2020, the Board received funding from UNHCR’s Innovation Service to pursue this initiative to counteract rumors, both those spread from Bulgarian sources and those spread among refugees themselves.
On the lookout for misinformation from all directions
“I’m a refugee from Syria who has been in Bulgaria for seven years, and although I’m integrated into the society — I’ve been working the whole time I’ve been here — there have always been rumors coming from both sides,” says Alias Yousef Suleyman, a Refugee Advisory Board member and anti-rumor campaign coordinator. “We want to better integrate refugees into the society and also show the real image of the refugees to the Bulgarian community.”
Ahmed Bazoon, a refugee from Iraq who has also lived in Bulgaria for seven years and is Suleyman’s counterpart on the Board, agrees that the crux of the issue is information, or a lack of it.
“It was important to think about some projects online to communicate with refugees in society,” he explains. “We need to not only give them information, but trusted information. This is how we came up with the idea for the campaign as the best way to communicate and solve issues that we can for the refugees and society.”
The cornerstone of the project is the Anti-rumour website, which is led by Bazoon and Suleyman, who both have some experience in journalism. They collaborate with Vladimir Milev from the Bulgarian Council on Refugees and Migrants, who helps with the Bulgarian language side. In addition to Bulgarian, the site is currently available in English, Arabic, and Farsi, with plans to add French in the future. According to van Harten, the first four languages were chosen based on the most common countries of origin of persons of concern in Bulgaria.
“Our main purpose is to counter misinformation in the media and among refugees,” Suleyman says. “We try to find the source of any rumors and then find official or reliable information to debunk it.”
Of course, it’s important that the site includes Bulgarian for the education of members of the local community. But it also serves as an opportunity to help refugees and other persons of concern learn Bulgarian to more easily integrate in their new homes, even if the information is available in their own language.
The power of journalistic principles of accuracy and fact checking
Because rumors can come from both Bulgarian sources and refugees, the site includes sections specific to each, as well as general news. Misinformation is clearly identified as fake and responded to with a factual article marked as such. There’s also a place to report misinformation that needs further investigation.
As an example of topics covered on the website, there’s a rumor in Europe that persons of concern from Arab and Muslim countries want to migrate to Europe and replace the current populations, including Bulgarian society. The site shares both the original sources of the rumor and a factual report stating this information is false. As is the case nearly everywhere there are also rumors that the COVID vaccine is harmful — an idea that is being spread largely among refugees — which the site debunks as well.
“There was another rumor that the Bulgarian government won’t give the vaccine to refugees, which isn’t true,” Bazoon says. “We also have a Facebook page, where we let refugees know they can receive the vaccine. We work with both sides — the Bulgarian society and the refugee community — to change both sides’ minds if they have any wrong information.”
The site won’t publish anything — either inaccurate news or the truth — unless they can verify the sources, which is essential to building trust. In fact, there’s a section of the site that lists key sources, and sources are also noted at the end of each article.
Trust is paramount because, unfortunately, some false rumors about refugees are persistent everywhere, such as the idea that they are lazy or unwilling to work. To that end, a more recent project of the Refugee Advisory Board is refurbishing used furniture to donate to Bulgarians in need, to both thank them for welcoming them and demonstrate that they are contributing to their new home.
“It’s important to change the perceptions of refugees,” van Harten says. “Our Board members are all experts in their professional fields, and the fact that they’re refugees does not determine who they are, nor is it the case that refugees can’t do anything but take from society. The message from refugees to Bulgarian society is, ‘We are here to help you and we’re grateful for the help you have given us.’”
Empowerment and the ongoing mission to do more
Although the misinformation campaign project scope officially ended in March 2021, it has taken on a life of its own, adds van Harten. “We provided the space for this body to operate, and they self-organized,” she says.
Bazoon and Suleyman have plans to expand the site moving forward, despite the fact that like every member of the Board they are volunteering while working one or more jobs, with one member studying full time. Bazoon notes that because everyone has a lot of responsibility beyond the Board, they work closely as a team to support each other.
“We still want to have more projects and take more action to be part of the society,” he says. “We are responsible for the project — it’s like a baby, so it’s the first project but not the last.”
After all, given the current prevalence of misinformation on social media and even in traditional media, and the impact that can have on public sentiment, there will continue to be a need for outlets like this that provide reputable, fact-checked information. Based on the number of visitors to the site, which average about 150 per month, there appears to be a hunger for the truth.
Suleyman adds that launching the site was the most challenging aspect of the project. “Now it’s time to harvest some fruits of the hard work we did in the first two quarters,” he says. “Maybe we can publish more content, work faster, and be better organized. Our main purpose is to be effective in writing articles that should be published in the media and counter any misinformation. Hopefully this will become a really good primary source that refugees will rely on for information.”
