Excerpt from one of the five videos that show the mechanisms of misinformation and manipulation. SCREENSHOT VACCINATION SCIENCE
On August 31, astronaut Thomas Pesquet was forced to tweet at length that “of course yes, humans went to the moon during the Apollo missions” after his words were distorted by deniers of our satellite’s man’s conquest.
Another example of how online disinformation remains a major societal problem. And this despite the proliferation of debunker services in the media [de l’anglais debunk, « discréditer »], journalists who, like Decoders of the World, seek to verify claims suspected of being false. How to find other countermeasures against this “fake news” that is spreading massively in social networks and thus in society and in households?
Also read: Online disinformation: EU adopts new code of conduct for social media and platforms
An international team of psychology researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol (UK) and Perth (Australia) have partnered with the to conduct an experiment of unprecedented scale Jigsaw Laboratory (Google, USA). They have “psychologically inoculated” Internet users, they explain, through intermediary videos, low-dose false reports to immunize them like a vaccine against disinformation and teach them to separate the wheat from the chaff. The rather encouraging results were published in Sciences Advances on August 24th.
“We came up with the idea of ’vaccinating’ people against common manipulation techniques by developing the Bad News game in February 2018,” explains the publication’s lead author, Cambridge University’s Jon Roozenbeek. The idea of these videos is an extension of this first work. »
Studying in the lab and in “real life”
To launch this new study, the researchers envisioned five short 92-second films that showcase manipulation techniques commonly used in disinformation practices: emotionally manipulative language, inconsistency, false dilemmas, the scapegoat technique, and ad hominem attacks .
Each of the videos has the same structure: a first misleading message – for example, in the case of manipulative language, a sad little girl with an voiceover that encourages you to watch the sequel, even if it makes you cry – then comes a film of animation to decode the manipulation. “When the message is announced as evoking negative emotions like fear, anger, or contempt, it encourages watching the rest of the video,” we learn. Finally, a short hands-on exercise concludes the film to verify that the manipulation technique has been properly processed.
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