Reclaiming our narratives - A practical guide to countering identity-based disinformation

Summary

A step-by-step toolkit from the OICD’s Bruce White for countering disinformation that offers “narrow and rigid definitions of identity” as the only route to belonging. Because “directly confronting or debunking it often backfires”, it proposes ‘Positive Identity Expansion’: stories from a community’s own culture that meet the same needs and “expand rather than narrow” people’s sense of themselves.

Rationale

Deep dispositions “generally can’t be reasoned with”; nor, this guide finds, can identity. But it stays with messaging, where we’d also back the clubs and traditions it mines for material.