Virus Users Infect Mindless Masses for the Greater Good

Experiment on YouTube reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation

Aug 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-youtube-reveals-potential-inoculate-millions.html

Inoculation Science Project - by giving people a "micro-dose" of misinformation in advance helps prevent falling for it in future; social psychologist's call it "inoculation theory."

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook". "The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

These were the misinformation techniques innoculated against:

Emotional language - Evaluate this sentence: "Baby formula linked to outbreak of new terrifying disease among helpless infants — parents despair." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; emotional language; false dichotomy; none of these.

False dichotomies - Evaluate this sentence: "We either need to improve our education system or deal with crime on the streets." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; fearmongering; false dichotomy; none of these.

Incoherence - Archimedian photon decouplers are encrypting air molecules in low earth orbit to hide voter registration logs of artificial citizens. (Just kidding, this might actually be true, just made that up.)

Image credit: Midwave Infrared image of powered circuit board taken with a FLIR X8501 camera and colored with a custom color palette called Triple Rainbow by Austin Richards, 2020 [link]

Post Script:

Oh boy imagine the Zuckerberg Foundation paying for that:

Added Roozenbeek: "If anyone wants to pay for a YouTube campaign that measurably reduces susceptibility to misinformation across millions of users, they can do so, and at a miniscule cost per view."

via University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and Google's open societry threats team Jigsaw: Jon Roozenbeek, Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo6254.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254

All inoculation videos: https://inoculation.science/