Resisting fake news

Sander van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society at Cambridge, outlines how to “inoculate” people against fake news.

Sander van der Linden

Professor of Social Psychology in Society

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Sander van der Linden

Professor of Social Psychology in Society

02 Jul 2021

Key Points

Debunking and fact checking aren’t always enough to correct a myth once it’s ingrained in someone’s mind.
People are inclined to believe misinformation when it's coming from people they see as legitimate and trustworthy.
By exposing people to a weakened “dose” of fake news, it’s possible to inoculate them against future attacks.

The fake news pandemic

Photo by Juan Ci

What can we do about fake news? Our research team has spent a lot of years trying to develop what we refer to as a psychological vaccine against fake news. I'm writing a book at the moment which will be called The Truth Vaccine. In it, I explain the viral analogy, which I think will be useful here as well.

We can think of misinformation as a pathogen in the sense that it spreads from one person to another, from one mind to another, quickly and rapidly, and unlike real viruses, without the need for physical contact. But also it acts like a virus in the sense that once it enters the human brain, it nests itself in our memories and it makes links with other things we know. It's very difficult to correct. In fact, we found that the standard way of doing things, like fact checking and debunking, although good, aren’t so effective because it's very difficult to correct a myth once it's ingrained itself in our minds and memories.

Intellectual antibodies

It's less desirable to try to fix misinformation and fake news once it's established itself, so there's a lot of value in the “prevention is better than cure” metaphor. Given that the misinformation virus has certain building blocks, just as you have DNA with a real virus, we know what goes into misinformation in terms of the techniques that have been used over and over again throughout history.

What we wanted to do was look at the misinformation virus and distill the antidote from it. To use it as a force against itself, in a way. You can also think of it like jiu jitsu, in that you're using the weight of your opponent against itself in order to defend yourself.

We started to test this idea just as you would a regular vaccine, when you inject people with a weakened dose of a virus in order to trigger the production of antibodies. This confers protection against future infection. You can do the same with misinformation in the sense that you can preemptively expose people to a weakened dose of fake news, and the techniques that are used in the production of fake news, in an attempt to cultivate intellectual antibodies against misinformation.

Developing the fake news vaccine

We did some lab experiments with specific pieces of fake news. We looked at a story about climate change that went viral on social media and was shared millions of times. It claimed that thousands of scientists had signed this petition saying that climate change isn't happening.

What we did was to preemptively vaccinate people against this petition. We told people you might hear about some petition but that you shouldn't believe it because it's completely false. Look at who signed it: The Spice Girls, Charles Darwin. It’s completely ridiculous. And in fact these scientists are just a tiny proportion of US science graduates every year.

Once we gave people the tools to arm themselves against a persuasive misinformation attack, we let people go to this website and read the front page. We found that people who were “vaccinated” were more immune. It wasn't full immunity, but they were more immune to that misinformation than those in the control group. That's really when we started thinking of ways to scale this idea. Rather than trying to “prebunk” every idea, could we scale it up and really look at the underlying tactics that are being used?

So we looked at all the misinformation that we could find. We tried to distill the building blocks, the DNA of the virus. What we found was that there are these commonalities — the use of conspiracy theories, trying to polarise people, the use of emotions to manipulate people, discrediting or deflecting others, trolling people online and so on. We decided that we could try to vaccinate people against those techniques.

The misinformation game

Photo by Dragana Gordic

We teamed up with a media company called Bad News, who had also been thinking about building new tools to fight misinformation. We built a simulation — essentially a social media feed like Twitter. It was called Bad News and in it, people step into the shoes of a misinformation producer or fake news tycoon. What happens is that over time, your mission is to try to spread fake news using these techniques and gain as many followers as you can without losing credibility.

So you start tweeting and impersonating people — online experts, for example, which is part of the fake expert technique. And people react to you in the game. You get more followers and it’s very interactive. It’s a better way for people to learn.

Mark Twain once said that a man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. You should never carry a cat by the tail, of course, but it's a powerful analogy. Rather than giving people a factsheet, people can now generate their own antibodies in a simulated environment.

The new science of prebunking

How can people use the inoculation metaphor in their daily lives? You have to think about the fact that, ultimately, inoculation is a rhetorical strategy. You could preemptively protect someone from being duped by misinformation by injecting them with a weakened dose and preemptively refuting the misinformation attack. So rather than refuting after the fact, you preemptively do what we call prebunking.

For example, you might get messages on WhatsApp containing misinformation about the coronavirus or something else that's completely false. How do you prebunk that within your own family?

One of the things you can do if you’ve seen that there's a lot of misinformation out there, is to start prebunking intensively beforehand. You might say, look, there's going to be a misinformation attack. People are going to try to convince you of the fact that there's a conspiracy or that this is a cure or so on. But you shouldn’t believe them. Here are the facts. Here are resources that you can use to actually argue against what you'll be told.

You have to give people specific resources — sticky facts, we call them. Things that people can relate to and remember. Part of the reason why science is so difficult for people is that you don't want to give them a 120-page science book. You have to give people digestible facts that they can use to arm themselves against these misinformation attacks, and you also need to expose the motives of those trying to deceive. Because sometimes people are actually inclined to believe misinformation because it's coming from people that they see as legitimate and trustworthy. You have to not only arm people with the facts but also expose the sinister motives behind misinformation.

A multilayer defense system

Photo by flowgraph

The question you have to ask is whether there is an incentive for social media companies to implement solutions that will decrease their revenue. That’s part of the bigger conversation we need to have. Maybe we need people to demand the kind of accountability and transparency that will ultimately be necessary to get a productive collaboration between social media, scientists, governments and civil actors. Individual discernment capabilities aren't going to be the full solution. We're going to need the help of social media companies.

We've done a project with the Cabinet Office here in the UK — a new game called Go Viral, which is supposed to help protect people against misinformation about COVID-19. The Cabinet Office has made this part of their evidence-based communications campaign and it's great to see that these tools are being used. The WHO has put it on their website, the United Nations has tweeted about it, and that's been great and essential in getting the research out there and for it to have practical meaning. We put theories and tools out there and it’s up to other actors to actually implement them in the real world.

To sum up, we need what I call a multilayer defense system. Prebunk or inoculate everyone when we can. When that fails, debunk and fact check in real time. We could have real time rebuttals and real time fact checking. When that fails, we can still debunk after the fact. We also need to reorganise the way that social media is incentivised. When we do all that, I think the chance that misinformation will get through and spread as fast, deep and efficiently as it has done will be greatly minimised.