The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – a company with ties to the British and other governments and originally known as the “Nudge Unit” – has teamed up with researchers from the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney.
The result is a report titled, “Countering misinformation about refugees and migrants: An evidence-based framework,” which was presented on March 11 during a speed briefing event.
The goal of the collaboration is to develop a framework that would allow for “prebunking misinformation” about migrants and refugees in Australia.
More: The Shadowy “Nudge Units” Working Online to Manipulate You from Afar
Unlike debunking, which is supposed to correct false information, “prebunking” is a dystopian concept of an “arbiter of truth” controlling the narrative by influencing how people perceive information about certain topics, in essence, “training” the public in advance to react to information in the desired way.
The Kaldor Centre wants to influence public opinion against what the framework labels as misinformation about migrants and refugees, but also the so-called “Trump-style” immigration policies.
While announcing the report, this research organization shared that it hopes it will be put to use not only in Australia but also in other countries facing similar issues.
“We all need to fight misinformation in our conversations about refugees and migration, but sometimes we struggle to find the right response. This framework takes the guesswork out of it,” said Kaldor Centre Director Daniel Ghezelbash.
The partner in this endeavor, BIT, is closely associated not only with the British government – that created the “Nudge Unit” in 2010, and then four years later formed a separate company while maintaining a one-third ownership stake.
The rest was owned by Nesta, a charity that also has deep ties with a number of governments, including the UK, the US, and Canada, via millions of dollars it receives in funding each year. In 2021, Nesta became the sole owner of BIT.
But the British government used its services during the pandemic when BIT was accused of being behind the government’s “grossly unethical tactics to scare the public into Covid compliance.”
Among BIT’s clients are state and city governments in the US, as well as government agencies in many countries, the UK and Australia included. In addition, BIT works with the United Nations, World Bank, Big Tech companies (Meta being one of them), Sky media group, and many other large organizations, businesses, and NGOs.
