Communicating for a better world

United Nation’s Melissa Fleming gives an inspiring lecture on responsible influence: "Forget about a PR disaster and worry about a planetary one".

Melissa Flemming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications (CIPR lecture)

Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, really went there, no holding back – here's what's wrong, and here's the rallying call.

Ironically, PR often has a bad reputation, defined by the infamous players who enable bad things, but as Melissa says, "our profession is there to communicate for the common good". She urged everyone in PR, marketing and communications to stop supporting unethical causes, especially fossil fuels, and to put an end to greenwashing. If we all come together for a better future, the skills we have can change things.

UN's communications guide

I firmly believe if you know what you're talking about, you can explain it simply. Not a fan of hiding behind complicating things. So I loved her communications guide:

The UN's communication aims

1. Open hearts
2. Invite to learn more

The UN's communications template

What?
Why care?
What now?

The UN's key measurement

Who will move the needle, and have we reached those people?

"Statistics are human beings with the tears dried off"

People get overwhelmed by the scale of the problems and pain, and then they become numb. Individual stories are so important for people to connect to.

Melissa wrote a book A Hope More Powerful than the Sea about Doaa, a teenager Syrian refugee, who survived a shipwreck and saved a baby's life, as her fiancé and hundreds of passengers died at sea when their boat was deliberately attacked, insults hurled at them as they fell into the water. This hate has been created. It's not what humans naturally do.

Melissa cites research shows mounting news avoidance, with reasons including overwhelming doom and gloom, and distrust of traditional media.

Misinformation and Disinformation

A key focus of her lecture was the fight against misinformation. As she said, "Our world is in crisis. Authoritarianism is on the rise. Democracy is increasingly in peril. Climate change is already an existential threat".

She added that the Covid-19 pandemic had reversed years of progress on sustainability goals. She goes as far as to say, "our information ecosystems are poisoned with disinformation and hate".

The difference between disinformation and misinformation
(I had to look it up)

•    Disinformation is deliberate and malicious false information.
•    Misinformation is false or inaccurate information, not necessarily intentional.

(Think D for deliberate; M for mistake)

Real-life damage from mis- and dis- information (cited in her talk)

•    UNICEF has said a lot of people in Africa have stopped getting their children immunised.
•    Mynmar military government convinced people to do horrific things and hate speech online played a significant role in this.
•    UN peacekeepers are being attacked. 70% of UN peacekeepers said disinformation harms their job.
•    Governments confusing and misleading people about climate change.
•    Opportunistic politicians frightening the public and making refugees scapegoats for problems they didn't cause.
•    AI: there are currently 500 AI news sites with no human oversight, spreading false information and deep fakes. People are trusting and sharing ChatGPT's answers, which are often false, with no sources for the information given.

The UN is still on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and Melissa's article on why the UN is needed on there is really inspiring too. She notes the UN talks to people working at all the social media platforms, except for X – they used to, but everyone that was part of the trust & safety team there is no longer employed.

Melisa acknowledges that hate speech has long led to atrocities, even before social media, but the scale it's able to achieve, unregulated, with us all seeing different things, polarising us, and removing any accountability or verification, has contributed to the rise of dangerous politicians and movements across the world.

Have your say

The UN is conducting global research into our information ecosystems. Have your say: un.org/informationintegrity (deadline 1 December 2023)

Watch the lecture

I watched it live and assumed the recording would only be available to CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) members, but it's public, which is a credit to Melissa Fleming and the CIPR.
Watch it here (it starts 11 mins in).
Please note: the lecture took place on 04 October 2023, before the most recent crisis in Gaza.

Stay safe out/in there. Questions I recommend asking:

• How are you being positioned? What are they focusing on and what are they missing out?

• Who benefits from me believing this? What do they want me to do and why?

• Look at multiple sources – different news outlets, in the UK and across the world, different organisations, different people, who are all reporting on the same story.
  
  When you do this, you'll soon see how differently you can frame the exact same story, depending on what you're trying to do. That doesn’t mean everyone has some ulterior motive (but some do). If the aim is more peace, love, and understanding for all, cool, if it’s not, what is going on?

Like all tools, communications can be used to create beautiful things, or to break them. Words and stories have so much power. Can communications save the world? As it's responsible, in all its forms, for what people think, then yes, for sure, it must, we must.

10 November 2023