Electoral periods are accompanied by fake news campaigns aimed at directing voting intentions. Social networks, the main means of distribution of these hoaxes, have been overwhelmed by the overwhelming amount of resources used to spread manipulated content. While security mechanisms are strengthened on each digital platform, some social researchers have designed an emergency containment strategy: psychological inoculation.
Psychological inoculation is a preventive strategy to combat misinformation for manipulative purposes. With short informative videos or calls to action on major viral content platforms, people are warned about the nature of alarming news and details are shared to effectively identify them. In this way, as with traditional vaccines, the population generates “antibodies” against the harmful agents that are now on the Internet.
Video example “vaccine”
Although psychological protection campaigns are not new (in English, they are known as prebunking), its effectiveness is not entirely clear. Until now, there was no evidence of its impact in a real-world setting. Recent research from Cornell University, in conjunction with Google, states that the combination of two or more advertising campaigns prebunking rejection of suspicious information on social networks increases. The results presented in the magazine Nature are clear: on its own, inoculation to detect manipulative emotional language will not work if it is not reinforced with warnings about the likelihood of reading false information.
Learn to distinguish manipulated content
The team responsible for the research was based on five tests on a total of 7,286 participants. People were required to watch a traditional “vaccine” video that informed them about the role of language in their emotions and persuasiveness. Subsequently, they had to discern between news previously identified as fake and manipulated content.
The report mentions that the vaccine videos only worked for people to identify news that attempted to change their psycho-emotional state. However, the inoculation did not help them distinguish between true and false content. The effectiveness of the experiment increased when they added “reminders” about the possibility of false data in the informational content. When these two campaigns were used prebunking at the same time, participants were more protected from misinformation and manipulation.
The researchers hope that governments will use their study as a basis to implement strategies against disinformation. As long as there are no more effective policies on social networks against sensational news, psychological vaccination campaigns will be the best ally, they consider.
“Combining two techniques that can be easily implemented on a large scale can improve people’s abilities to avoid being deceived,” explained Stephan Lewandowsky, co-author of the study.
“If you’re going to do these interventions, you should probably start with a basic reminder about accuracy. Simply getting people to think more about whether things are true will carry over, at least in the short term, to what they’re already seeing.” decisions about what they would share online,” concluded Gordon Pennycook, the study’s principal investigator.
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