In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) created the “Coronavirus Rumor Control” website to educate the population and refute any rumors surrounding the measures taken to combat the pandemic.
Several other US federal authorities operate corresponding rumor control websites – whether about election security or the dangers that e-cigarettes pose to people’s health: the spread of rumors should always be prevented with reliable information.
Jan Dreer
About the author
Thilo Neidhöfer studied history and political science in Oldenburg and Long Beach and is currently an IFK researcher at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies at the Linz University of Art and Design in Vienna.
Behind these educational campaigns, which now use terms such as “disinformation”, “disinformation” and “disinformation” (MDM) to essentially differentiate between the unintentional and intentional transmission of false information, there is the assumption that this represents a possible or dangerous real for the American economy represents society. They do so by undermining trust in institutions, encouraging harmful behavior or triggering violence. Under the banner of combating rumors, the issue is always public or national security.
Fighting rumors at home
Combating rumors has a long history. State-organized rumor control in the US began during World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, misinformation on the subject spread so massively that President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized it as a serious threat to his country.
To deal with rumors, the “Rumor Project” was launched by the US government in 1942. On the one hand, it was concerned with gathering rumors. To this end, different people from the population were recruited: hairdressers, police officers, librarians, teachers, taxi drivers, bank employees and dentists. They should collect rumors from their communities and report them to federal authorities. Such “Local Rumor Control Projects” have been initiated in a total of 42 states.
US National Archives and Records Administration posters from the 1940s
On the other hand, extensive educational campaigns, on the radio, with films and, above all, posters that were displayed in train stations, post offices and grocery stores aimed to raise awareness among the population of the supposed dangers that the rumors represented for their own war. efforts. It was feared that the enemy could obtain important information about the American military through “careless talk” and that the rumors could weaken the war morale of their own society.
Furthermore, numerous so-called “Rumor Clinics” sprang up throughout North America, for which Boston provided the model. There, Gordon Allport and his doctoral student Robert Knapp of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University worked with the Boston Herald. A weekly column analyzed and debunked widespread rumors.
Rumor control as riot control
The investigation into the rumors and their containment, carried out in the 1940s, continued after the war. When so-called race riots occurred in the mid-1960s during the civil rights movement, social scientists revived the ideas of rumor control. Rumor Control Centers have been created in almost a hundred cities across the country, each working closely with local police.
People should use hotlines to report rumors of imminent unrest. The idea is that violent riots are nipped in the bud. In practice, however, the centers were predominantly used by white people, especially women from the suburbs, who reported their fears, often racially motivated. However, the Rumor Control Centers did not serve black communities in cities. With the temporary end of the race riots, the centers’ livelihood appeared to have disappeared and they gradually ceased operations.
US National Archives and Records Administration US poster from the 1940s
Rumors as a weapon
In a completely different way, rumors were systematically used by the US government to discredit the black civil rights movement. The FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) under J. Edgar Hoover utilized, among other things, methods from the arsenal of psychological warfare. So-called “bad-jacketing,” for example, intentionally spread false information about key members of the movement in order to create distrust among them and undermine the movement. Letters were even sent to women in which their husbands were accused of having affairs in order to protect their lives by destroying marriages.
Trust is important
The history of rumors and their containment, especially in the USA, can be seen as one of relationships of trust and distrust between the population and the government. Anyway, things haven’t been going well lately. Since the late 1970s, citizens’ trust in the country’s most important institutions has steadily declined.
A Gallup poll from July this year found that Americans are at an all-time low in this regard. Congress reached just eight percentage points, one of the lowest levels ever. In any case, it seems doubtful that Rumor Control’s historical attempts have ever contributed to building trust in this regard.