Inoculation Against Disinformation

For many years now disinformation, misinformation and #FakeNews have become the bane of online platforms globally. The spread of mendacious news as facts monumentally threatens the culture of critical thinking, while influencing politics/elections across the globe.

Twitter was once banned in Nigeria partly for this reason amongst other growing concerns. All efforts by social media platforms to combat this have been largely ineffective, counterproductive and politicized, thus, worsening the situation and widening the trust gap.

Most of us condemned the approach of Govt on the ban of Twitter because it was tantamount to gagging free speech but this doesn’t change the fact that the growing trend in disinformation, targeted harassment, cyberbullying and fake news is impacting our society negatively.

How do we safe guard our highly impressionable society if the removal of false claims or debunking them hasn’t yielded much fruit? The attempt by a few influences to correct some of these misdemeanors with facts often make people cling to their false assumptions even more.

A new study published in the Science Advances journal offers a simple (but not simplistic) solution called Pre-Bunking. This serves as an inoculative measure against misinformation via the trigger of basic critical thinking skills.

The strategy is based on a communication theory (inoculation theory) that suggests one can build resistance to persuasion by exposing people to arguments against their beliefs beforehand. It was proven to be effective in a study on nearly 30,000 participants on YouTube.

From watching several short inoculation videos, people’s ability to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in online misinformation both in the lab and in real-world environment where the exposure is prevalent. There are different types of manipulative communication deployed in the spread of false information such as ad hominem attacks, false dichotomies, scapegoating and incoherence. In our clime, we have seen this common in popular political campaigns as can be easily identified.

Statements as simple as; “I used to respect you, but now will unfollow,” “If you don’t support/plea allegiance to my/our favorite candidate you are the enemy of Nigeria and have been paid” and other false dichotomies are typical examples of manipulation spread via troll farms.

The study practically shows that Pre-Bunking is far more effective in helping people make their own correct decisions about misinformation than pulling down content and employing fact checkers (who are subject to biases and prejudices themselves and may reinforce misinformation).🎙