NON-PROFIT GROUPS SAY their volunteers and staff face “routine harassment” due to misinformation being shared online.

Some groups said they have had to take additional security measures to protect their teams, according to new research. 

Some organisations also said that they have received so-called ‘bait’ emails which were intentionally designed to provoke a response which will be shared online. 

Examples of these included emails purportedly from a displaced person looking for advice on how to enter Ireland illegally, or a teenager trying to access to hormones or trans healthcare without their parents’ knowledge.

The results were part of new research about how misinformation impacts the non-profit sector carried out by Dr Shane Murphy and Dr Eileen Culloty for the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO). The Journal is a member of EDMO Ireland.

“This evidence suggests that manufactured content and disinformation are being used strategically to polarise conversations and create content that can be used to attack or discredit organisations working with vulnerable communities,” the report reads.

The survey found that 85% of 200 respondents said misinformation makes it harder for them to achieve their goals.

The report noted that narratives about NGOs (non-government organisations) have been particularly harmful, with most respondents saying that they had been criticised for being “corrupt”, “unaccountable”, or “a waste of taxpayers money” — even when they were not funded by the state.

Last year, The Journal debunked a video shared hundreds of times that named a list of NGOs that it said had been wasting taxpayers’ money.

Many of those organisations named in the video did not receive state funding, including a small group of Christians providing healthcare in Kenya, a group helping to educate Afghan women, and a Buddhist centre.

Further interviews with 20 of the organisations that took part in the survey showed that staff in migration and LGBTQ+ groups in particular faced abuse that was “racist, misogynistic, or focused on physical appearance”.

In general, misinformation about the voluntary and community groups meant that the expertise of those working on the frontline was dismissed as being opinion rather than evidence-based, and staff were often assumed to be politically radical just due to working in the sector.

They also noted misinformation that delegitimised their work drove away the people they were trying to help, while making media and government workers less willing to engage with them.

Groups that spoke to the researchers said that abuse had driven them from social media platforms and that they had stopped posting images of staff or service users and promoted their events less.

The charity sector has seen a general decline in trust and confidence in recent years, according to research carried out in Ireland and the UK by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and the Charity Commission for England and Wales.

This is in part due to an uptick in misinformation about NGOs and unfounded questions about them.

The most common narratives link NGOs to government funding or certain politicians, and suggest that non-profits are doing the governments’ bidding for them within civil society.

Such claims seek to advance the perception that NGOs generally support government policies, such as the criticism levelled at groups that advocate on behalf of minorities which supported the Irish government’s Hate Speech legislation.

This claim overlooks the fact that many NGOs advocate for changes in government policy, and that advocacy groups regularly criticise the government in their own reports and through the media.

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