The disinformation wave isn’t new. Visual storytellers profiling social causes also need to be on guard—and not just for falsehoods generated digitally. In this re-post of a podcast interview we had with the nonprofit media company, Shine Global, the take-aways remain relevant.

“We had been told that some of these girls had been sold into brothels as children, then rescued a few years later—and that, apparently, never happened at all.”

Susan MacLaury, Executive Director and Producer, Shine Global

In this audio interview, which we produced as a pilot for the Chronicle of Philanthropy some years ago, Shine Global’s Executive Director, Susan MacLaury, talks about what makes a social good story great—and shares her nonprofit’s brush with disinformation during its production of a feature documentary on human trafficking in Thailand. The project began as a profile of a charismatic activist who led a globally-regarded NGO that provided shelter and education for girls rescued from brothels, but then took a sharply different turn when discrepancies emerged when interviewing the girls and their families. The resulting film, called The Wrong Light, ended up documenting the struggle by filmmakers Dave Adams and Josie Swantek to find the truth amid a powerful NGO’s questionable ethics and desperate search for global funding.

“For the most part, I think NGOs are trying to do very, very good work,” MacLaury says in our interview, “and I sympathize. Resources for nonprofits are very limited. There’s a very tiny pie and a lot of people are trying to get a piece, and for some, it stands to reason that if you can tell a more compelling story about the kids you’re working with, that may translate into greater donations. But what we found with Selling Our Daughters [what had been the working title for the film when the project began], was that these girls had never been at risk of being trafficked.”

We’re republishing Susan’s storytelling insights here now, as a reminder that disinformation isn’t just about politics.

_{Photo: Dave Adams/Shine Global/The Cinema Guild}