Vic­to­ria Romero and Emi­ly Tang are uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and mem­bers of the Nation­al Youth Advi­so­ry Coun­cil for Action Cana­da for Sex­u­al Health and Rights. Matthew John­son is the direc­tor of edu­ca­tion for Medi­aS­marts. Scott Neigh inter­views them about issues of mis- and dis­in­for­ma­tion when it comes to sex­u­al health and rights, and about this year’s Sex­u­al and Repro­duc­tive Health Aware­ness Week (or SRH Week) campaign.

Action Cana­da engages in pub­lic edu­ca­tion, health pro­mo­tion, ser­vice pro­vi­sion, and pol­i­cy advo­ca­cy relat­ed to sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive health and rights in Cana­da and glob­al­ly. Medi­aS­marts focus­es on pro­mot­ing dig­i­tal media lit­er­a­cy among youth by pro­vid­ing a wide range of edu­ca­tion­al resources for teach­ers and par­ents, and to a less­er extent for youth themselves.

SRH Week is an annu­al cam­paign from Action Cana­da that focus­es on a top­ic relat­ed to sex­u­al health and rights. It offers events and resources on that top­ic to the gen­er­al pub­lic, to health care providers, and to oth­er audi­ences. This year’s SRH Week runs from Feb­ru­ary 13 to 17. Its theme will be ​“Get the Facts!”, and it includes a focus on the prob­lem of mis- and disinformation.

The infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment that sur­rounds us today is, to put it mild­ly, chal­leng­ing. Not that there is any­thing new about dom­i­nant ways of know­ing the world that exalt the already-pow­er­ful and fur­ther mar­gin­al­ize the oppressed, and there is a long his­to­ry of the use of dis­in­for­ma­tion as a tool to accom­plish nefar­i­ous ends. But as tech­nol­o­gy has shift­ed, we have end­ed up with an infor­ma­tion sys­tem that is more chaot­ic, hard­er to nav­i­gate, and seem­ing­ly more vul­ner­a­ble to manip­u­la­tion than ever before. Main­stream insti­tu­tions that pro­duce and cir­cu­late knowl­edge – like schools, news­pa­pers, and gov­ern­ments – con­tin­ue their role in repro­duc­ing set­tler colo­nial­ism, white suprema­cy, cap­i­tal­ism, patri­archy, het­ero­sex­ism, ableism, cis­sex­ism, and more. But there seems to be more space today for reac­tionary move­ments, from last decade’s ​“Gamer­Gate” to today’s grow­ing far right, to use sen­sa­tion­al­ism, dis­tor­tion, and decep­tion to grow their base and make all of those things sharply worse.

The preva­lence of mis­in­for­ma­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion when it comes to sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive health and rights is also noth­ing new. Whether we found out about them via for­mal school cur­ricu­lum, chains of spec­u­la­tive whis­per­ing among peers, or awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions with par­ents, very few of us have ever been lucky enough while grow­ing up to have oppor­tu­ni­ties to learn about bod­ies, sex­u­al­i­ty, rela­tion­ships, and all of the messy social stuff sur­round­ing them in accu­rate, com­pre­hen­sive, just, and lib­er­a­to­ry ways. And what is avail­able, in the words of Tang, is ​“very often very cis, het­ero, and white oriented.”

In some ways, you could argue that things have got­ten bet­ter over time – with the inter­net, there is more oppor­tu­ni­ty for young peo­ple to seek out good infor­ma­tion for them­selves, com­pared to past decades when the only options were to ask an author­i­ty fig­ure, cross your fin­gers that your school might be one of the few to offer decent sex ed, or work up the nerve to see what you could find in a pub­lic library. But while it may be more pos­si­ble to find good infor­ma­tion today than in the past, the good stuff is often dilut­ed in a sea of infor­ma­tion that is wrong, harm­ful, and even mali­cious. Romero said, ​“While there is a lot of very good fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion [online], there’s also a ton of mis­in­for­ma­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion. And one thing that I’ve seen per­son­al­ly is there is a large lack in under­stand­ing of how to tell the dif­fer­ence between the two.”

Bar­ri­ers remain a fac­tor, whether that is the uneven avail­abil­i­ty of inter­net access or the fear of get­ting caught search­ing par­tic­u­lar top­ics. Medi­aS­marts leads the longest run­ning research project in the world on youth and dig­i­tal media lit­er­a­cy, and John­son said that only around 1 in 5 youth in Cana­da today report seek­ing out infor­ma­tion about sex­u­al health and rela­tion­ship issues online. The rate is about twice that for queer and trans youth, which John­son said sug­gests there is an even greater lack of good infor­ma­tion in oth­er sources that is rel­e­vant to their needs.

In addi­tion, sex-relat­ed mis­in­for­ma­tion cir­cu­lates wide­ly due to things like the reach of social media influ­encers who just don’t know what they’re talk­ing about and the per­va­sive­ness of click­bait. Memes and jokes that are stig­ma­tiz­ing, oppres­sive, or just plain wrong trav­el far and fast. Of course, it can be real­ly hard to know where to look for good infor­ma­tion, and it can be hard to rec­og­nize it when you find it. And final­ly, there is the delib­er­ate­ly cir­cu­lat­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly from sources push­ing a range of right and far-right polit­i­cal agen­das – from the demo­niza­tion of LGBTQ peo­ple, to lies about abor­tion, to all sorts of things that are meant to ampli­fy sex­u­al stig­ma and shame.

John­son agreed that there are peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions that are ​“inten­tion­al­ly pro­mot­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion about sex­u­al health top­ics – whether that is dis­in­for­ma­tion around trans­gen­der issues, whether that’s dis­in­for­ma­tion around sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, whether it’s dis­in­for­ma­tion around abor­tion.” He con­tin­ued, ​“There are cer­tain groups that are tar­get­ed more often. And also groups that are more often, you might say, demo­nized – groups about whom there is more dis­in­for­ma­tion being spread and where there are orga­nized cam­paigns of dis­in­for­ma­tion aimed at them. And who are in many cas­es used as rhetor­i­cal tools for broad­er polit­i­cal ends.”

Over­all, John­son said that Medi­aS­marts’ research indi­cates that young peo­ple are using ​“more and bet­ter strate­gies” to ver­i­fy infor­ma­tion that they find com­pared to even a few years ago, and are more like­ly to ver­i­fy sources out­side of school con­texts. Nonethe­less, often those strate­gies are not well suit­ed to today’s infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment, rife as it is with delib­er­ate deception.

Old­er strate­gies, which are still often taught in schools, include inves­ti­gat­ing what an orga­ni­za­tion says about them­selves on their web­site, ​“which made sense in an infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment where you could assume that peo­ple weren’t just flat out lying about who they were or just things in gen­er­al.” Today, Medi­aS­marts focus­es on teach­ing what John­son calls ​“lat­er­al read­ing, where you actu­al­ly don’t take the source’s word for any­thing, and you don’t look too close­ly at the source until you ver­i­fy that it is reli­able.” Inves­ti­gat­ing the sources of dis­in­for­ma­tion can help peo­ple under­stand larg­er trends in who is tar­get­ed and why, and the polit­i­cal moti­va­tions behind dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns. With a laugh, John­son said, ​“The demand for mis- and dis­in­for­ma­tion is equal across the spec­trum, but the sup­ply absolute­ly is not.”

An addi­tion­al chal­lenge has to do with how youth relate to sources that they encounter online. John­son said, ​“The research has shown that for most young peo­ple, in fact, the issue is not that they are not skep­ti­cal enough, but that they are equal­ly skep­ti­cal of all sources – what’s some­times called trust com­pres­sion, where because they don’t know how to ver­i­fy a reli­able source, and because they’ve been told – in many cas­es, many, many times – not to trust every­thing they see online, but they haven’t been told how to find out what they can trust, they’re equal­ly skep­ti­cal of every source.” This can lead youth to select sources in oth­er ways, like their per­son­al feel­ings or the strength of their paraso­cial rela­tion­ship with the con­tent cre­ator in question.

John­son said, ​“That’s why most of our mate­ri­als, includ­ing our mate­ri­als about ver­i­fy­ing infor­ma­tion on sex­u­al health, don’t just look at how to debunk false infor­ma­tion or rec­og­nize unre­li­able sources, but also focus on how to tell when some­thing is reli­able and how to find reli­able sources.”

This year’s SRH Week is inter­ven­ing in all of this. It is cir­cu­lat­ing resources with inclu­sive, evi­dence-based infor­ma­tion about sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive health, and offer­ing sup­ports to peo­ple to help them devel­op media lit­er­a­cy skills for fig­ur­ing out how to nav­i­gate our infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment around these top­ics. And Medi­aS­marts has its own spec­trum of resources and pro­gram­ming, both for media lit­er­a­cy in gen­er­al and a few spe­cif­ic to ques­tions of sex­u­al health.

Romero argued that it is impor­tant to have a civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tion like Action Cana­da putting on this kind of cam­paign, rather than count­ing on main­stream insti­tu­tions like schools, gov­ern­ments, or the mass media, giv­en ​“how espe­cial­ly younger demo­graph­ics are view­ing infor­ma­tion, per­haps from bod­ies of author­i­ty like the gov­ern­ment or, you know, your health ser­vices in your province.” She con­tin­ued, ​“I find that a lot of younger peo­ple are a bit appre­hen­sive to our tra­di­tion­al struc­tures and sys­tems in soci­ety … root­ed in colo­nial vio­lence. And how there has been a cer­tain bias in a lot of infor­ma­tion com­ing from author­i­ty for a very long time.”

Tang added, ​“Mass media and also school sys­tems are often fund­ed by the gov­ern­ment. And so there is poten­tial­ly some bias there. … Depend­ing on which school sys­tem you went to, you might have been taught maybe infor­ma­tion that is often mis­lead­ing.” It is impor­tant, there­fore, for there to be ini­tia­tives that com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion about sex­u­al health and rights in ways that are ​“inclu­sive” and ​“acces­si­ble.”

And of course there is val­ue not just to con­sum­ing bet­ter infor­ma­tion and to becom­ing a bet­ter con­sumer of infor­ma­tion, but to inter­ven­ing our­selves in the infor­ma­tion land­scape. Tang, for instance, empha­sized the impor­tance of ensur­ing that there are peo­ple with a range of expe­ri­ences of oppres­sion in posi­tions of ​“pow­er and author­i­ty” with­in the insti­tu­tions in our infor­ma­tion sys­tem. Romero argued for ​“involve­ment from the com­mu­ni­ties, or the demo­graph­ic, or groups that the infor­ma­tion or the source is try­ing to reach.”

Romero said, ​“If you know an orga­ni­za­tion is putting out per­haps not dis­in­for­ma­tion, but maybe mis­in­for­ma­tion around abor­tion or … emer­gency con­tra­cep­tives, then maybe we should be tak­ing a look at why, or how. What is their moti­va­tion behind that?”

“Why are we allow­ing these bod­ies to put out this infor­ma­tion?” Romero con­tin­ued. ​“Like, do they have a harm­ful motive? Are they intend­ing to shame peo­ple? Are they intend­ing to per­haps direct peo­ple to a cer­tain, you know, moral stan­dard? And it just real­ly comes down to ques­tion­ing why and push­ing bod­ies on why they are still con­tin­u­ing to do so.”

John­son said, ​“A part of this is teach­ing young peo­ple about their pow­er as as cit­i­zens and as con­sumers. That one of the ben­e­fits of being online is that we all have a voice. And we can use that voice to change things in our online spaces. We can use that voice to change the val­ues of our online spaces. We can use that voice to change the ratio of good to bad infor­ma­tion. Because our infor­ma­tion ecosys­tem isn’t affect­ed only by our deci­sion not to share bad infor­ma­tion, but we can active­ly improve it by shar­ing good information.”

As well, he con­tin­ued, ​“We can also use dig­i­tal tools to par­tic­i­pate as cit­i­zens, to change how gov­ern­ments do things, to change cur­ricu­lum.” He cit­ed as an exam­ple high school stu­dents who suc­cess­ful­ly orga­nized in Ontario a num­ber of years ago to get con­sent edu­ca­tion added to health cur­ricu­lum. ​“A real­ly impor­tant part of dig­i­tal media lit­er­a­cy is teach­ing young peo­ple and all peo­ple that they have the pow­er to use dig­i­tal tools to make a difference.”

For Tang, it comes down to this: ​“How do we make [sex­u­al health] infor­ma­tion more inclu­sive for every­one – [more] trans inclu­sive … more pro-choice … more cul­tur­al­ly sen­si­tive and inclusive?”

Episodes of Talk­ing Rad­i­cal Radio on SRH Week in ear­li­er years include ​“Next steps for sex­u­al and repro­duc­tive rights activism in Cana­da,” ​“Cen­tring BIPOC youth in ques­tions of sex­u­al health and rights,” ​“Sex ed, health, and jus­tice,” and ​“Sex pos­i­tive par­ent­ing and social justice.”