1 Introduction: Why Fight Disinformation with Empathy?

Imagine that you, a library worker, are teaching a workshop in a course that is focused on developing skills in analyzing academic articles. You’ve asked the students to all look at the same peer reviewed article and to work through a set of article anatomy steps. The article you have selected is a study of measles infection based on age of vaccination, and students have been asked to identify the parts of the paper including the research question, the conclusion, the results section, etc. Two students approach you and ask that you assign them another paper to work with, as they do not believe in vaccines. How would you handle this situation?

In our current information climate, this scenario may not seem strange or unexpected. Many library workers may have already faced similar interactions with learners that challenge our professional values and ethics.

Academic libraries perform a balancing act when it comes to facts and reason – they value freedom of expression and encourage wide ranging exploration, while at the same time upholding rigorous academic work and truth in information. Around the 2016 US election cycle, many academic libraries tried to maintain this balance in the face of surging disinformation by creating workshops and online research guides centered around countering fake news^[1] and media information literacy more generally. Many of these research guides remain online, unchanged, and with little indication that this approach alone is making a difference in a world replete with conspiracy theory and undetectable bias. We believe the reliance on traditional information literacy has proven to be insufficient in the face of what has turned into an ongoing and worsening relation to objective truths.

Our interest with this handbook is to bolster this traditional approach with some alternatives. We will discuss how library workers can use an empathetic approach to creating connections with learners,^[2] building learners’ trust in our institutions and even preventing them from falling prey to disinformative sources.

Because of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and media bias, and the rise of platforms that elevate the outrageous and the deceptive,^[3] false information is often easier to find than credible information^[4] and disinformation has become more pervasive than ever. Disinformation doesn’t only manifest in specific resources, it also significantly impacts how people have learned to search for and evaluate information. As library workers, we cannot ignore its presence or simply redirect patrons to credible resources because the ubiquity of disinformation obscures access to those resources.

We do want to acknowledge that while credible sources of information still exist and have value, and that truth and objective reality exist, people are struggling with these basic concepts in both negative and positive ways – value judgments about truth and objectivity are often used to exclude marginalized voices, but the absolute rejection of those concepts also puts people at risk.

Through a review of emerging literature in this area, we have found that an empathy-based approach to library work in academic libraries can help learners who may be struggling with conspiracy theories and biased sources understand why those sources are appealing. Through empathy, we describe how we can lead learners to approach sources in the future with an understanding that their material situation, social position, and identity may be affecting the emotional reactions they have to those sources. Empathy is an important tool for countering disinformation because it enables patrons to be receptive to learning new information and to feel safe even when having their existing viewpoints challenged. All research, from that conducted by seasoned professors to preliminary projects by first year undergraduates, requires this comfort with growth – although of course, the approaches for these learners need to be very different. The current disinformation climate encourages polarization, anti-intellectualism, and the erosion of trust in previously credible resources; by contrast empathy builds connection, enables nuance, humanizes the process of knowledge creation, and can be a contributing factor to building trust. Empathy is a necessary first step for receptivity to learning.

This handbook is aimed at academic library staff, librarians, and library educators who work with the communities their libraries serve. Its purpose is to outline the concept of empathy-based approaches to misinformation and disinformation in academic libraries, and to provide some practical suggestions on how to do this, as well as additional resources that inform the practice. By the end this handbook, you will be able to:

• Explain the strengths and weaknesses of traditional information literacy frameworks.
• Articulate the nuances around the concept of empathy
• Describe the place of empathy in academic libraries
• Appreciate the importance of empathy for countering disinformation and
• Identify tangible steps to incorporating empathy into your work

Empathy is an essential first step to foster learning; this handbook concludes with a set of resources for next steps to counter disinformation. These include works on identifying specific types of disinformation, fact checking, debunking and prebunking, information literacy instruction plans, media bias resources, and supports for family and friends.