Debunking conspiracy theories doesn’t always work. A new study by YouTube says ‘pre-bunking’ might.
An experiment on YouTube by Google researchers and academics has shown some promise in using videos to "pre-bunk" misinformation.In the days before the 2020 election, social media platforms began experimenting with the idea of “pre-bunking”: pre-emptively debunking misinformation or conspiracy theories by telling people what to watch out for.
“Words like ‘fact-checking’ themselves are becoming politicized, and that’s a problem, so you need to find a way around that,” said Jon Roozenbeek, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University’sThe researchers compared the effects to vaccination, “inoculating” people against the harmful effects of conspiracy theories, propaganda or other misinformation. The study involved nearly 30,000 participants.
To avoid turning off political partisans, the researchers created their five cartoons without using any real political or media figures, choosing instead to illustrate their points with fictional characters.One cartoon explains the concept of an ad hominem attack, in which a person attacks someone making an argument rather than addressing the merits of the argument itself.
Within a day of seeing one of the videos, a random subset of participants was given a one-question quiz to test how well they recognized the manipulation technique featured in the ad. Researchers found that a single video ad boosted recognition by about 5% on average. “It advances the state of the art by demonstrating these effects across multiple preregistered studies and showing that they can be obtained in the field on YouTube and that the effects seem to persist at least briefly after exposure,” he said in an email.
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