Google plans to expand a campaign against online misinformation to Germany this week, and later India, as first reported by the Associated Press. The strategy, known as “pre-bunking” or “attitudinal inoculation,” aims to train people on how to recognize false information and manipulated facts on the internet before they even encounter them.
In short videos and photos—shown across platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook in standard advertising slots—Google will continue its push to make pre-bunking a go-to method for dispelling disinformation.
A massive study published in August 2022 demonstrated the potential value of pre-bunking among a group of nearly 30,000 participants. After viewing pre-bunking videos that highlighted well-known disinformation tactics like emotional appeals, false dichotomies, and ad hominem attacks, the researchers found that people were 5% better, on average, at identifying these tricks when shown a variety of social media posts.
That study was conducted by researchers from Cambridge and Bristol Universities, as well as partners from Alphabet-owned YouTube and Google’s internet threat research arm, Jigsaw. Google has also run smaller tests of its own on U.S. audiences, focused on covid-19 vaccine misinformation. Beginning a few months ago, the company began to employ the pre-bunk strategy on a wider-scale, testing the method beyond closed research studies and in the real world.
In fall 2022, the company started up tests in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia focused largely on combatting widely perpetuated, xenophobic, false claims about Ukrainian refugees (e.g. that refugees are criminal or steal jobs and housing). There, the company used videos, which offered viewers ways to recognize unreliable sources of information and were intended to increase awareness of efforts to manipulate public perception.
