Vaccinating people against fake news

Finland is the first country to try inoculating people against fake news on a national scale. As Russian fake news began making its way across the border into Finland in 2014, the Finnish government developed a digital literacy course for state-run elementary and high schools. The curriculum, still in use, asks students to become disinformation czars, writing their own off-the-wall fake-news stories. As they learn how fake news is produced, students also learn to recognize and be skeptical of similar content in the real world.

Elsewhere, researchers and organizations are experimenting with inoculation efforts on a smaller scale. In Australia, communications professor John Cook designed an online course in 2015 to teach people how to detect common disinformation tactics used by climate deniers. So far, more than 40,000 people have enrolled in Cook’s course.

In the United States, nonprofits like the News Literacy Project teach middle and high school students how to distinguish between fact and fiction in the media. NLP has developed a series of 14 interactive lessons, some of which walk students through fake-news creation and give examples of bogus stories likely to spread like wildfire (“Fireman Suspended & Jailed by Atheist Mayor for Praying at Scene of Fire”). More than 40,000 U.S. educators have signed up to work with NLP so far. (The Science Literacy Foundation, which supports OpenMind, where this piece originally ran, is also a financial supporter of the News Literacy Project.)

Adding to the challenge of fake-news inoculation, a serious literacy campaign must do more than train people to ferret out falsehoods. It must also counter the emotional pull of those falsehoods. People tend to wade into conspiracies and false narratives when they feel scared and vulnerable, according to Jolley. When their brains flood with stress hormones, their working memory capacity takes a hit, which can affect their critical thinking. “You’ve got the skills” to mentally counter conspiracy theories, Jolley says, “but you may not be able to use them.” Research shows that people who feel socially isolated are also more likely to believe in conspiracies.

By contrast, the more fulfilled and capable people feel, the less vulnerable they are to disinformation. Jolley suggests that community-building ventures in which people feel part of a larger whole, like mentoring programs or clubs, could help individuals grow psychologically secure enough to resist the pull of a conspiracy theory. Making it easier to access mental health services, he adds, might also support people’s well-being in ways that improve their immunity to common fake-news tactics.

As the disinformation-vaccine movement grows, one crucial unknown is just how much inoculation is enough. “What’s the equivalent of herd immunity for human society?” Vincent asks. “Do we have to have inoculation for, let’s say, 80% of a country in order for the spread of misinformation to be mitigated?” Calculating that percentage, he notes, is a complex undertaking that would have to account for different ways of reaching people online and the multiple strategies used to counter fake news.

Given how challenging it will be to defang disinformation, it seems fitting that the Cambridge team’s Harmony Square game builds to an open-ended finish. When I complete the game’s final chapter, everyone in town is still fighting over the content my fake news empire churns out, and it’s unclear whether the destruction I’ve caused can be reversed. Surveying the damage, my boss applauds me. “They’re all at each other’s throats now.”-Nieman

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