Most people assume that once a harmful narrative takes hold, it’s impossible to stop.
That misinformation moves too fast, reaches too far, and runs too deep to be interrupted. After decades of working in communities where narratives have fueled real violence, Search for Common Ground knows something different.
Harmful narratives can be interrupted. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
One Pause. One life-saving moment.
In Niger’s Tahoua region, a photo appeared in a WhatsApp group claiming to show herders who had killed a farmer. Within minutes, it was everywhere. A community was on the edge of conflict.
Nana-Aïcha Issa Labran paused before she reacted.
Trained through Search’s Laafi-Kibaru project, she verified the image. Traced it. Discovered it was from 2013, over a decade old. She showed her community the evidence. The rumor collapsed. The conflict didn’t happen.
That’s not luck. That’s training. And it’s replicable.
Turning Influencers Into Peacebuilders
In Kenya, the challenge was bigger than a single rumor. Harmful narratives were spreading across platforms, shaping how young people understood their communities, their identities, and their futures.
The conventional response would have been to warn young people about the dangers of social media.
Search made a different choice. Our Digital Stewards Training brought together social media influencers from across the country, equipping them not just with technical skills but with ethics, responsibility, and legal accountability.
Within weeks, these young stewards were hosting live sessions on cyber safety, starting conversations about digital responsibility, and reaching their communities with something more powerful than viral content.
Building Regional Resilience
Across the Sahel. Search has spent years understanding how harmful narratives travel across borders, how they exploit grievances, and what it takes to shift them at a regional level.
That work has built something invaluable: a body of knowledge about how narrative ecosystems actually function in fragile contexts. Who are the trusted messengers? Which platforms matter? What makes an alternative narrative genuinely compelling to the people you’re trying to reach?
That knowledge doesn’t stay in one country. It travels.
Applying Decades of Learning to a New Crisis
In Haiti, where gang violence has reshaped daily life for millions, the narrative war is playing out online in real time. Gang life is being made to look like status, belonging, and opportunity — faster than alternatives can respond.
In March 2026, the Government of Canada asked Search to bring its decades of experience to this crisis.
We began the way we always begin. By listening.
Before designing a single intervention, we commissioned groundbreaking research into how gang narratives spread online in Haiti — mapping the ecosystem, tracing how content moves between platforms, and identifying where positive voices already exist.
Now that research is becoming action. We’re influencing how governments approach the online dimension of Haiti’s crisis. We’re advocating to platforms like Meta and TikTok to better protect the positive voices already doing this work. And we’re designing pilot initiatives to test what makes hope travel faster than violence.
Because if stories can pull people toward violence, they can also pull people toward peace.
We’ve seen it in Niger. In Kenya. Across the Sahel. In Nigeria.
And now in Haiti.
Harmful narratives can be stopped. Communities can be equipped. Peace can be made more visible and compelling than violence.
But only if the work is funded.
Your support makes it possible.
