Google to expand “prebunking” disinformation in Europe

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WASHINGTON (AP) — After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will launch a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online disinformation.

The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign is also underway in India.

It’s an approach called pre-bunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they come across them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and technology companies.

“There’s a real appetite for solutions,” said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, an incubator division of Google that studies emerging societal challenges. “Using ads as a vehicle to counter a disinformation technique is pretty new. And we’re thrilled with the results.”

While belief in hoaxes and conspiracy theories is nothing new, the speed and reach of the Internet has given them heightened power. When catalyzed by algorithms, misleading claims can discourage people from getting vaccines, spread authoritarian propaganda, foment distrust in democratic institutions, and spur violence.

It’s a challenge with few easy solutions. Journalistic fact checks are effective, but they are labor-intensive, not widely read, and won’t convince those who already distrust traditional journalism. Content moderation by tech companies is another answer, but it only pushes disinformation elsewhere, prompting cries of censorship and bias.

Pre-bunking videos, in contrast, are relatively cheap and easy to produce and can be viewed by millions of people when posted on popular platforms. They also avoid the political challenge altogether by focusing not on the themes of false claims, which are often cultural lightning rods, but on the techniques that make viral disinformation so contagious.

These techniques include fear, scapegoating, false comparisons, exaggeration, and lack of context. Whether the topic is COVID-19, mass shootings, immigration, climate change or elections, misleading claims often rely on one or more of these tricks to exploit emotions and short-circuit critical thinking.

Last fall, Google launched the largest theory test yet with a pre-bunking video campaign in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The videos explored several techniques seen in false claims about Ukrainian refugees. Many of these claims were based on alarming and unsubstantiated stories of refugees committing crimes or taking away jobs from residents.

The videos have been viewed 38 million times on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter, a number that equates to the majority of the population in the three nations. The researchers found that compared to people who hadn’t seen the videos, those who had watched them were more likely to be able to identify misinformation techniques and less likely to spread false claims to others.

The pilot was the largest pre-bunking test to date and adds to a growing consensus supporting the theory.

“This is good news in what has essentially been a bad news business when it comes to disinformation,” said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, a Poynter Institute media literacy initiative that incorporated pre-bunking into own programs in countries including Brazil, Spain, France and the United States

Mahadevan called the strategy a “pretty efficient way to deal with disinformation at scale, because you can reach a lot of people and deal with a wide range of disinformation at the same time.”

Google’s new campaign in Germany will include a focus on photos and videos and how easily they can be presented as evidence of something fake. One example: last week, following the earthquake in Turkey, some social media users shared video of the massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, claiming it was actually footage of a nuclear explosion triggered by the earthquake. It wasn’t the first time the 2020 explosion had been the subject of misinformation.

Google will announce its new German campaign on Monday ahead of next week’s Munich security conference. The timing of the announcement, which precedes the annual gathering of international security officials, reflects growing concerns about the impact of disinformation among both tech companies and government officials.

Tech companies like pre-bunking because it avoids sensitive topics that are easily politicized, said Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge University professor who is considered a leading expert on the theory. Van der Linden worked with Google on his campaign and now also advises Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has incorporated pre-bunking into many different media literacy and anti-disinformation campaigns in recent years, the company told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.

They include a 2021 program in the United States that offered media literacy training on COVID-19 to the Black, Latino and Asian American communities. Participants who went through the training were later tested and found to be much more resilient to misleading claims about COVID-19.

Pre-bunking has its challenges. The effects of the videos eventually wear off, requiring the periodic use of “booster” videos. Additionally, the videos must be crafted well enough to hold the viewer’s attention and adapted to different languages, cultures, and demographics. And like a vaccine, it’s not 100% effective for everyone.

Google found that its campaign in Eastern Europe varied from country to country. While the effect of the videos was highest in Poland, in Slovakia they had “little or no effect,” the researchers found. One possible explanation: The videos were dubbed into the Slovak language and not specifically created for local audiences.

But along with traditional journalism, content moderation, and other methods to combat disinformation, pre-bunking could help communities achieve a kind of herd immunity when it comes to disinformation, limiting its spread and impact.

“You can think of disinformation as a virus. Spreads. It lingers. It can make people act a certain way,” Van der Linden told the AP. “Some people develop symptoms, some don’t. So: If it spreads and acts like a virus, then maybe we can figure out how to inoculate people.”

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Follow the AP’s coverage of misinformation at https://apnews.com/hub/misinformation.

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