Working with Jigsaw, a unit within Google dedicated to tackling threats to open societies, a team of psychologists from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol created 90-second clips designed to familiarize users with manipulation techniques such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence.
The 'Inoculation Science' animation covering emotional language. Emotions are powerful tools of persuasion. Research shows that using emotional words, especially ones that evoke negative emotions such as fear or outrage, increases the viral potential of social media content. This use of negative emotional words to manipulate is sometimes referred to as"fearmongering".
Inoculation Science video covering scapegoating. Scapegoating is when a person or group is singled out or takes unwarranted blame for a particular problem. Scapegoating is commonly seen throughout history, but it remains common even today. Credit: Inoculation Science "Harmful misinformation takes many forms, but the manipulative tactics and narratives are often repeated and can therefore be predicted," said Beth Goldberg, co-author and Head of Research and Development for Google's Jigsaw unit.
A screenshot from the Inoculation Science video explaining use of scapegoating in misinformation. Credit: Inoculation Science Factoring all this in, the team found that inoculation videos improved people's ability to spot misinformation, and boosted their confidence in being able to do so again. The clips also improve the quality of"sharing decisions": whether or not to spread damaging content.
The clips aimed to inoculate against misinformation tactics of hyper-emotive language and use of false dichotomies, and the questions—based on fictional posts—tested for detection of these tropes. YouTube also gave a"control" group of users who had not viewed a video the same test question. In total, 22,632 users answered a question.
Cambridge_Uni ScienceAdvances And yet many of the things said to be misinformation, Hunter Biden's laptop, the Steele Dossier, for example turned out to be real, or later proved to be fake.
Cambridge_Uni ScienceAdvances A lot of today's misinformation is reality in 6 months When you limit anything called 'false' by the powers that be, you also suppress truth Thats what despots do to maintain control
Cambridge_Uni ScienceAdvances I’m inoculated. I don’t click on anything written by dogmatic scientists referring to dark matter or dark energy. It’s like a cosmological religion they have. Also talking about magnetic fields without referencing the origin of the currents responsible for generating the B fields
Cambridge_Uni ScienceAdvances Well, 90 seconds clips about misinformation !!!! It takes less than that to verify the sources of thoses fake news!!!! And beleivers, will call theses clips ' fake news '. But, maybe it will help, who knows...
Cambridge_Uni ScienceAdvances Misinformation is a matter of perspective. Any person claiming absolute accuracy or infallible knowledge is not a scientist. They're a propagandist.