The proliferation of conspiracy theories could be stopped with short pre- video animations on the internet.
ChrisStokel-Walker
It's possible to reduce the flow of fake news by watching educational ads on the internet.
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It is possible to make us more aware of the techniques used to spread fake news by playing short educational animations in the advertisements. The researchers behind the animation hope that they can reduce the number of people falling for false claims.
A group of people at the University of Cambridge have created a series of 90-second videos about the fake news and online conspiracies that are being peddled. They wanted to pre-bunk by giving people skills to identify fake or manipulated content.
In five different experiments, the researchers tested the videos on about 6,400 people. The use of emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating and ad hominem attacks were shown in the videos that the participants watched.
One group of users was shown a video that was designed by Roozenbeek and his colleagues, while another group was shown a video that wasn't very interesting. After watching the pre-bunking video, both groups were asked if the fake social media posts they saw were legit. The people shown a pre-bunking video were more aware of what was being said.
After a sixth study a year later to ensure the results were replicable, the researchers tested their videos in the wild and showed two examples of pre-bunking videos before the videos they had clicked on to watch.
More than one million people watched 90-second videos. 30 per cent of the people were shown a sentence and asked to identify a method. Members of a group were given the same questions but no pre-bunking exposure, but watching a pre-bunking video improved their ability to identify such techniques. The impact of these videos in the real world was shown by that.
Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, told New Scientist: "These findings are exciting because they demonstrate that we can scale pre-bunking far and wide, using ads as a vehicle, and that the pre-bunking
A pre-bunking video campaign is being launched in central and eastern Europe.
They know their limitations and it is a good study. They claim that inoculation videos can be used as public safety announcements.
It might work for a lot of people. Conspiracy theorists wouldn't trust a government source that such inoculation comes from.
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