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Can we enter the fight against extremism?

June 20, 2017

Very useful for activists: maybe homophobic campaigns can be identified as extremism and erased from Youtube!

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From Google BLOG
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Terrorism is an attack on open societies, and addressing the threat posed by violence and hate is a critical challenge for us all. Google and YouTube are committed to being part of the solution. We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online. There should be no place for terrorist content on our services.

While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now.

We have thousands of people around the world who review and counter abuse of our platforms. Our engineers have developed technology to prevent re-uploads of known terrorist content using image-matching technology. We have invested in systems that use content-based signals to help identify new videos for removal. And we have developed partnerships with expert groups, counter-extremism agencies, and the other technology companies to help inform and strengthen our efforts.

Today, we are pledging to take four additional steps.

First, we are increasing our use of technology to help identify extremist and terrorism-related videos. This can be challenging: a video of a terrorist attack may be informative news reporting if broadcast by the BBC, or glorification of violence if uploaded in a different context by a different user. We have used video analysis models to find and assess more than 50 per cent of the terrorism-related content we have removed over the past six months. We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.

Second, because technology alone is not a silver bullet, we will greatly increase the number of independent experts in YouTube’s Trusted Flagger programme. Machines can help identify problematic videos, but human experts still play a role in nuanced decisions about the line between violent propaganda and religious or newsworthy speech. While many user flags can be inaccurate, Trusted Flagger reports are accurate over 90 per cent of the time and help us scale our efforts and identify emerging areas of concern. We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants. This allows us to benefit from the expertise of specialised organisations working on issues like hate speech, self-harm, and terrorism. We will also expand our work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalise and recruit extremists.

Third, we will be taking a tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies — for example, videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content. In future these will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements. That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find. We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.

Finally, YouTube will expand its role in counter-radicalisation efforts. Building on our successful Creators for Change programme promoting YouTube voices against hate and radicalisation, we are working with Jigsaw to implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.

We have also recently committed to working with industry colleagues—including Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter—to establish an international forum to share and develop technology and support smaller companies and accelerate our joint efforts to tackle terrorism online.

Collectively, these changes will make a difference. And we’ll keep working on the problem until we get the balance right. Extremists and terrorists seek to attack and erode not just our security, but also our values; the very things that make our societies open and free. We must not let them. Together, we can build lasting solutions that address the threats to our security and our freedoms. It is a sweeping and complex challenge. We are committed to playing our part.

How to reclaim Family Values from haters: A great guide for activists!

June 16, 2017

In 2016–2017, ten movement leaders and experts from the LGBTI, women’s rights and progressive faith movements charted the use of family in recent years of progressive activism.

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They engaged with 200+ experts, movement leaders, activists, scholars and grant makers through a survey, a conference and consultations with key organisations.

 

[box] “To continue winning over hearts and minds, social justice activists must complement their traditional approach based on rights, laws and standards (“We have the right to marriage”, “We have the right to free movement”) with a values-based approach (“We love each other and want to commit to spending our lives together”, “We all belong to a family”). This requires a fundamental shift in the conception, organisation and running of social justice campaigns.”

This guide invites social justice activists  to consider placing family equality at the centre of our progressive strategies, discourse and actions.

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[box] “Campaigning publicly about family appeals to people – law-makers, the public, specific audiences and their fundamental sense of what a family truly is about: love, care, belonging, and deeply shared values. Appealing to these shared values is essential to effective social justice activism”

 [box] “Good strategic communication and messaging can only be grounded in good prior research into what messaging will best appeal to voters’ and politicians’ values”

Download the guide now 

How to f…ck up your video

March 16, 2017

Reproduced from Charity.com

By Tom Tapper, co-founder and creative director, Nice and Serious

The five villains of charity video production (and how to defeat them)

Image: Nice and Serious

Since 2008 we’ve produced hundreds of videos for charities at Nice and Serious. Some have been a big success, others less so. But over time we’ve seen a familiar pattern emerge; the faces of five fiendish villains we all struggle to fight.

You might recognise some of them. We’ve painted a picture of those villains along with our tips to defeat them.

Informaticus

Meet Informaticus. He’s probably the most common villain we encounter. He overwhelms viewers with facts and figures, to the point where they disengage and drop-off. Why? Because humans don’t respond well to numbers; as it takes time for us to process them and they don’t emotionally resonate with us.

How to defeat him

The story is your greatest weapon against Informaticus. We can’t get enough of a good narrative. Find something tangible and human and recount the details. Have confidence that from the specifics of the story, viewers will see the bigger picture. Don’t forget audiences expect to be entertained by video content, not just informed. And always ask yourself: why would anyone want to watch this? If you can’t think of a good reason, keep working on the story.

Cautious Nauseous

This is Cautious Nauseous, a fiendish villain that feeds on your fears and anxieties. She knows you’ve got a lot riding on the film production – people to please and targets to hit –  and she’ll convince you to play it safe. The result? A video that’s uninspiring or unsharable.

How to defeat her

First of all, you need to become comfortable with some level of risk. Secondly, push your creative team (internal or external) to develop original creative ideas that meet your objectives. Thirdly, try and road test your concepts and scripts with colleagues, friends and family to get a fresh perspective. Finally, if you’re ambitious with your film, you’ll need to bring key stakeholders along with you from an early stage.

The Jargonaut

If you know a lot about a subject, you’re vulnerable to the Jargonaut. It represents a video with a robotic voice over and a script peppered with jargon. The result? People are sent to sleep.

How to defeat it

You have to fight the Jargonaut on two fronts. The first is language. Keep sentences short, words simple and the tone conversational. Read everything out loud – it will help highlight stumbling blocks. The second front is voice. Avoid a cold, generic voice over (sometimes referred to as Mid-Atlantic). Each accent has its associations, for example, in the U.K. a Scottish accent is considered trustworthy and a Geordie accent is considered friendly. So choose an accent that fits your organisation.

Miss Hit

Miss Hit is a villain without a target. She releases arrows in all directions, hoping one will hit. She represents a brief without a target audience, or an audience which is far too broad. Sometimes she gets lucky and hits the target, but mostly she misses, because it’s hard to judge the impact without a target audience in mind.

How to defeat her 

The most effective way to defeat her is to set a narrow target audience. And the good news is this is starting to become commonplace. But it’s no good defining a target audience if you don’t put it into place. Which is why we recommend creating a persona, and judging the creative against it. The result is that feedback goes from ‘I don’t like this because’ to ‘I don’t think Sarah will like this because’. This approach forces you to judge ideas more objectively.

The Blubbersaurus

The Blubbersaurus is a powerful beast. It represents the overuse of sorrow; the video smothers your audience in despair. The result? People have little sense of hope or agency. And if this approach is taken too often, it can leave your audience desensitised and disengaged with your cause.

How to defeat it

The key is not to fight the Blubbersaurus, but to befriend it. To evoke emotion is a powerful communication tool; a sorrowful scene can be a strong motivator to act. After all, jeopardy is a key part of a good narrative. But it’s important that you use emotional stories sparingly, and you give your audience a genuine sense of agency – by taking action they can help solve the problem you’ve just exposed them too.

Regardless of whether you work in a charity, corporate or agency, we’re all susceptible to the five villains. What’s important is that we familiarise ourselves with their fiendish faces and be mindful about the creative decisions we take in the film production process.

Food for Thought: “Why Street Protests Don’t Work”

March 2, 2017

This interesting OpEd appeared in The Atlantic

It dates back to April 2014 but most of the analysis would still be the same today. Brexit and Trump election have probably even driven the nail further. Or have things changed? Your comments are most welcome !!

Why Street Protests Don’t Work

How can so many demonstrations accomplish so little?

A Bank of India worker watches from a window as Occupy Wall Street protesters march along 47th Street in New York in September 2013. Joshua Lott/Reuters
Street protests are in. From Bangkok to Caracas, and Madrid to Moscow, these days not a week goes by without news that a massive crowd has amassed in the streets of another of the world’s big cities. The reasons for the protests vary (bad and too-costly public transport or education, the plan to raze a park, police abuse, etc.). Often, the grievance quickly expands to include a repudiation of the government, or its head, or more general denunciations of corruption and economic inequality.Aerial photos of the anti-government marches routinely show an intimidating sea of people furiously demanding change. And yet, it is surprising how little these crowds achieve. The fervent political energy on the ground is hugely disproportionate to the practical results of these demonstrations.

Notable exceptions of course exist: In Egypt, Tunisia, and Ukraine, street protests actually contributed to the overthrow of the government. But most massive rallies fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies. Occupy Wall Street is a great example. Born in the summer of 2011 (not in Wall Street but in Kuala Lumpur’s Dataran Merdeka), the Occupy movement spread quickly and was soon roaring in the central squares of nearly 2,600 cities around the world.

The hodgepodge groups that participated had no formal affiliation with one another, no clear hierarchy, and no obvious leaders. But social networks helped to virally replicate the movement so that the basic patterns of camping, protesting, fundraising, communicating with the media, and interacting with the authorities were similar from place to place. The same message echoed everywhere: It is unacceptable that global wealth is concentrated in the hands of an elite 1 percent while the remaining 99 percent can barely scrape by.

Such a global, massive, and seemingly well-organized initiative should have had a greater impact. But it didn’t. Though the topic of economic inequality has gained momentum in the years since, in practice it is hard to find meaningful changes in public policy based on Occupy’s proposals. By and large the Occupy movement has now vanished from the headlines.

In fact, government responses usually amount to little more than rhetorical appeasement, and certainly no major political reforms. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, for example, publicly validated the frustrations of those who took to the streets of her country, and promised that changes would be made, but those ‘changes’ have yet to materialize. The reaction of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the protests in his country was more aggressive. He accused the opposition and protesters of plotting a sophisticated conspiracy against him, and tried to block Twitter and YouTube. Earlier this month, Erdogan scored a huge victory in Turkey’s local elections. The same dynamic has played out during demonstrations against violence in Mexico City and corruption in New Delhi: massive marches, scant results.Why? How can so many extremely motivated people achieve so little? One answer might be found in the results of an experiment conducted by Anders Colding-Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he created a Facebook group to protest the demolition of the historic Stork Fountain in a major square of the Danish capital. Ten thousand people joined in the first week; after two weeks, the group was 27,000 members-strong. That was the extent of the experiment. There was never a plan to demolish the fountain—Colding-Jørgensen simply wanted to show how easy it was to create a relatively large group using social media.

Anti-government protesters wake up in their encampment in Bangkok. (Reuters/Damir Sagolj)

In today’s world, an appeal to protest via Twitter, Facebook, or text message is sure to attract a crowd, especially if it is to demonstrate against something—anything, really—that outrages us. The problem is what happens after the march. Sometimes it ends in violent confrontation with the police, and more often than not it simply fizzles out. Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government. This is the important point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, who writes that “Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

There is a powerful political engine running in the streets of many cities. It turns at high speed and produces a lot of political energy. But the engine is not connected to wheels, and so the “movement” doesn’t move. Achieving that motion requires organizations capable of old-fashioned and permanent political work that can leverage street demonstrations into political change and policy reforms. In most cases, that means political parties. But it doesn’t necessarily mean existing parties that demonstrators don’t trust to be change agents. Instead, as I have written elsewhere, we need new or deeply reformed parties that can energize both idealists who feel politically homeless and professionals who are fully devoted to the daily grind of building a political organization that knows how to convert political energy into public policies.

As many have noted, social media can both facilitate and undermine the formation of more effective political parties. We are familiar with the power of social media to identify, recruit, mobilize, and coordinate supporters as well as to fundraise. But we also know that clicktivism and slacktivism undermine real political work by creating the feel-good illusion that clicking “like’’ on a Facebook page or tweeting incendiary messages from the comfort of one’s computer or smartphone is equivalent to the activism that effects change.

What we’ve witnessed in recent years is the popularization of street marches without a plan for what happens next and how to keep protesters engaged and integrated in the political process. It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society.

Preparing the ground for a campaign launch: lessons from This Girl Can

February 16, 2017

Tanya Joseph, director of business partnerships at Sport England, wrote this great article for the Charitycomms.org website. It offers great insights into what you can (and should) do before you launch a campaign, to ensure it kicks off nicely. Remember a few campaign principles:

  1. No one likes a ghost town. So you need a good ground of supporters before you start so that the campaign already looks active and popular.
  2. Critiques and trolls are on the lookout, watching every move you make and desperate to jump on you, so make sure you occupy the ground and have a great crowd of supporters ready to shoot off. If you don’t, your campaign might kick off with a horde of wolves on its heels.
  3. Hit the ground running. Once the campaign starts, you cannot afford to loose the momentum. So galvanizing energy beforehand to create momentum and support will free your time and energy to reach out strategically to this “second tier” of supporters, which you could not reach out to earlier. This time is precious, so don’t waste it by using it to get your fans on board. They should already be there.

 

Preparing the ground for a campaign launch: lessons from This Girl Can

Image: This Girl Can

Launching a new campaign is always stressful. Is our creative right? Do we have the right media strategy? Have we got the tone right? Is the call to action clear? These were among the hundreds of questions we were asking ourselves in the weeks before we launched This Girl Can.

At the CharityComms Developing behaviour change campaigns conference, we explained how we used insight to ensure we were able to say yes to all of these questions and inspire millions of women and girls to get active.

But let’s be honest. Although you may tell yourself (and your boss or board) to have confidence in the insight, that won’t stop you fretting. If you are anything like me, you prepare the ground so that when you do go live, your campaign gets the best possible reception.

Getting our ducks in a row

Before the This Girl Can TV ad hit the airwaves in January 2015, we spent two months getting our ducks in a row. We wanted to make sure that when This Girl Can leapt into living rooms up and down the country, there was a welcoming committee ready to embrace it.

I was as sure as I could be that if the women we were targeting saw it, they would be positive about it. But I was also nervous that some people wouldn’t get it.

As part of our preparations, I wanted to gather some allies. We needed to have enough people out there who knew what we were trying to do and who would support us should we come under attack.

Talking to influencers

In the last eight weeks of 2014, a small team of us met with dozens of people we had identified as being influential on our audience – journalists and producers, politicians, industry leaders, bloggers and vloggers. Instead of seeking immediate coverage, we wanted them to understand the rationale for the campaign, the insight that lay behind it and the approach we would be taking. Rather than sharing all the creative, the team relied on facts, stats and pure passion for the campaign. I am pleased to say it worked.

Broadcaster Clare Balding loved the idea of the campaign and immediately asked to be involved. In fact, she loved it so much, she offered to host the screening we did for key stakeholders and talked about the campaign on every TV sofa she sat on in January 2015.

Talking and listening to women on Twitter

As well as building our coalition of influential supporters, we also wanted to recruit some regular women too. Again, we wanted to make sure we had a small cohort of well-informed women online.

We started with Twitter. We didn’t post much to begin with; we were very much in listening mode. Then we started to jump into conversations. A woman might tweet that she had intended to go to the gym but ended up in a coffee shop and @ThisGirlCanUK would come back with “at least the intention was there, better luck next time”. She might then respond and some of her followers might get involved in the conversation. I have to admit that I was very apprehensive about this. I really didn’t want people thinking we were spying on them but it worked because we got the tone right and only got involved where we added value.

By the time we went live with the ads, we had around 2,000 Twitter followers. The day before the ad was aired we encouraged our followers to watch out for it. And they did. The amazing 90 second version of our ad burst onto our screens in the first ad break of the 7.30 episode of Coronation Street on Monday 12 January 2015. Our 2,000 followers loved it, tweeted about it and within 12 hours that number had increased ten-fold and our online community continues to grow.

Reaping the rewards

Our strategy to create a community of advocates worked – we have built an incredibly engaged group of supporters who love the campaign and get what we do. They are like family. And we treat them as such – we talk to them and listen, share experiences with them and tell them about things before we tell others.

It was hard work doing the ground work, especially when we were trying to get ready for the actual launch, finalising creative and doing PR to generate post-launch coverage. But it was worth it.

More like this
Find out more about the This Girl Can campaign from the presentation at Developing behaviour change campaigns conference

Six behavioural psychology tips for effective campaigns

February 16, 2017
The following article by BOND’s ALICE DELEMARE, provides a good summary of essential strategic points and offers useful links to more detailed articles. A good article to keep close at hand.
From BOND

Changing people’s behaviour is difficult. If we want people to take sustained action in support of international development issues, we need to understand behavioural psychology and build this into our campaign design.

A recent CharityComms conference on developing behaviour change campaigns made me think about what lessons the development sector could learn from organisations like Sport England and the RNLI. These charities root their campaign strategies in an understanding of psychology in order to change the behaviour of their target audience.

1. Get to know your audience

In-depth audience knowledge is vital for a successful campaign. We talk about this a lot. But how well do we really know the audience we’re trying to reach? Where do they live? How old are they? How do they spend their free time? What are their main concerns? Where do they get their news? Who do they trust?

For example, Sport England spent time preparing the ground for their successful This Girl Can campaign by first listening to, then engaging in conversation with, women online.

One of the lessons of the EU referendum is that organisations need to be more in touch with their audiences. To be successful campaigners, we need to get out and about and talk to people we don’t usually come into contact with about their concerns. We need to step out of our comfort zone and try new ways of communicating and collecting information.

Sheffield-based social enterprise Aid Works is a good example of an organisation talking to a diverse range of people. They work all over Yorkshire, holding community meetings and going into schools.

2. Normalise the action

People are herd animals; we are strongly influenced by what those around us are doing. Given the option between two unfamiliar restaurants, one empty and one busy, most of us would choose the busy restaurant. We assume the food is better because everyone else is eating there.

If we want people to take action on international development issues, we need to show our audiences that the desired behaviour is “normal”.

We also need to be careful not to promote the opposite behaviour in our communications. For example, communicating that “134 patients failed to attend their appointments last month” in a doctor’s surgery, reinforces the idea that lots of people are missing appointments and won’t encourage the desired behaviour. The surgery would be better saying: “99% of patients kept to their appointments last month, make sure you do too.”

3. Choose the right messenger

We are also heavily influenced by the person communicating information to us. Social enterprise Behaviour Change explain that there are two important factors which determine the success of a messenger: whether or not they have experience of the issue and whether the audience trusts them. Insight from the Aid Attitude Tracker (AAT) backs this up. AAT research shows that the best messengers for development issues are ones whom the audience perceives to be both warm and competent.

Of course, to choose the right messenger you need to understand your target audience. In order to influence behaviour change in commercial fishermen, a closed network with a strong identity, the RNLI chose to work through partners like the Fishermen’s Mission and found individual fishermen that the community trusted to spread their message.

4. Appeal to the subconscious

Human behaviour is influenced by subconscious cues, as much as – if not more than – by our conscious thoughts.

This is why, for example, food retailers often pump out a signature scent. It serves as an aromatic marketing poster, triggering memories and desires, which encourage an emotional connection with the product.

Perhaps bringing a signature scent into international development campaigning is a little far-fetched, but exposure to certain words, colours and images can also have a subconscious effect on our behaviour.

Putting a mirror behind one tray of pastries at the CharityComms conference meant that fewer pastries were eaten from that tray, because people subconsciously self-evaluated before adding them to their plate. The colour blue is associated with trust and honesty and could be used to subconsciously impart such feelings to an audience when used in a presentation.

5. Strengthen intrinsic values

Psychologists have identified a number of consistently occurring human values: the things that people say they value in their lives. The prevalence of these values has been tested many times and found to be consistent across different countries and cultures. They can be grouped broadly into intrinsic and extrinsic values. The Common Cause Foundation explains more.

Extrinsic values are centred on external approval or rewards, for example: wealth, image, social status and authority. Intrinsic values relate to things we find inherently rewarding, for example, self-acceptance, connection to family and friends, connection with nature, and concern for others.

How can international development campaigners make sure we are designing campaigns that promote intrinsic values rather than extrinsic values?

Global Action Plan, a charity inspiring people to take practical environmental action, promote the values important for sustainable development through their work with school children. They found that pupils were more likely to adopt those values if they practised them through activities in the Water Explorer programme, instead of simply being told about them. We need to find ways to apply similar techniques to campaigns targeting adults.

6. Use a multi-dimensional approach

Behaviour change campaigns need to be multi-dimensional. And all the different elements need to work together. National, public-facing communications; face-to-face work with the target audience at a local level; and products which make it easy for people to change their behaviour all need to complement each other to have maximum impact.

For example, Parkinson’s UK combined national communications and work with in-house trainers in the retail and transport sectors, to promote understanding of Parkinson’s disease and other “hidden disabilities”. The Time to Change campaign addressed their audience of 25 to 44-year-olds across England through national, local and individual strategies to tackle mental health discrimination.

When designing and developing a behaviour change campaign, it is also important to bring in different opinions: expert and non-expert. Gathering a group of people with different expertise and different perspectives will help to create a campaign with a much broader appeal.

Have you seen any examples of campaigns that use behavioural psychology effectively? Have you tried any of these techniques in your own campaigns? Tweet us @bondngo with your ideas and suggestions.

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