Fighting misinformation: The organiser behind Stroud’s Coronavirus community response group

“For people to imply that there just isn't a pandemic, or no one's really dying of COVID. That's the level of misinformation we have to sort of engage with and challenge.”

Over the past year, Stroud Coronavirus Community Response Group (SCC) has become a hyperlocal internet forum, with local information for local people. One of the organisers James Beecher explains how he moderates the SCC against misinformation and anti-vaxxers.

You'd expect a coronavirus action group to be full of busy-bodied retired, older people or “Jackie Weavers”. Instead, it's been the next generation of younger people confined to their homes due to furlough and online work, who have been organising coronavirus action groups.

While most people were downloading TikTok or baking banana bread, James Beecher joined the Stroud Coronavirus Community Response group (SCC) as a moderator.

Various community groups have sprung up across the country in the last year, and there are now over 4,000 mutual aid groups operating in the UK.

The group's main purpose, according to James, is “sharing good quality information and resources” and the other is “helping people in the community to support each other.”

It made sense for James to join the response group. He had always been inspired by community responses to international crises and aid, particularly hurricanes in the United States like Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina. It's why he studied International Relations and Development Studies at University.

There’s a strong community atmosphere in Stroud. It's no surprise that when response groups began to form, there would eventually be one in Stroud.

“There was a period where it kind of looked like the UK maybe wasn't going to take some of the more strict measures”, he said.

“And some of us were a bit worried that it was just everything was not really prepared, and that there wasn't a system in place for supporting people if they needed to isolate and that kind of stuff.”

It's been a year since the response group was formed, and it now has a combined social media following of over 10,000 people.

The group has evolved into an active hyperlocal internet forum, creating graphs from local data, breaking down questions like "what tier is Stroud in?" and dealing with the often-confusing Covid restrictions after press briefings. As a result, other smaller groups have formed across Gloucestershire.

“We had a post that was like, ‘Do you live in the Uplands?’ and some of those groups formed as a result of people on those threads saying, ‘Oh yeah we all live in Uplands, I’m happy to set up a Whatsapp group.'"

“Some of them formed without us, some of them we helped to get going. But either way, we stepped back from them, we just let people organise that stuff themselves.”

James is also a Research Manager for Citizen Online, a charity that helps people understand the internet and improve their digital skills. As a result, James is often confronted with misinformation, such as internet banking scams, hacking, and, of course, coronavirus conspiracies and anti-vaxxers.

James lives in the centre of Stroud, so he's just a few minutes walk from The Beacon, a controversial community shop on the corner of Kendrick Street.

Last year, the shop was criticised by a local GP and councillors for displaying a sign claiming that Covid-19 is a blood disorder, not pneumonia, and that "there is no need for a vaccine."

James said: “It's one thing for people to sort of have a conversation about the vaccines, I think, but for people to imply that there just isn't a pandemic, or no one's really dying of Covid. That's the level of misinformation we have to sort of engage with and challenge.”

Anti-lockdown and anti-vaxxers protesters are a common sight on Stroud's high streets.

On social media, my generation normally mutes their annoying right-wing relatives. In their Facebook group with 5.4K members James has to help them overcome their conspiracy theorist tendencies; armed with website hyperlinks and statistics from the NHS and ONS.

“We've had to remove a few members who've kind of persistently tried to share things which are not right and have been very unresponsive to us gently trying to say to them, ‘That type of information is not accurate. This has been debunked, this is very conspiratorial, we're not going to let you post a link like that in here.’”

People have been brought together by coronavirus response groups. Neighbours are now talking to people online they have never met in person, despite living on the same street for years.

As the pandemic progresses, community groups are expected to become less important than they were in March 2020. Despite this, James remains optimistic about the group's future; he suggests including more statistics in the group's work and focusing more on mental health.

“We're probably not the first port of call for people in the way that we were in those first few months. This is the thing that's strange about the whole thing, we do have lots of people still engaging with us, but it is a different thing to what it was at the beginning.”

For more information, you can request to join the group by searching “Stroud Coronavirus Response Group” on Facebook or visit their website here.