Prebunking: The Future of Tackling Misinformation

In an age where false information spreads faster than ever before, researchers have found a promising new approach to combat misinformation. Rather than fact-checking content after it goes viral, a strategy called “prebunking” teaches people to recognize manipulation tactics before they encounter them.

“Harmful misinformation takes many forms, but the manipulative tactics and narratives are often repeated and can therefore be predicted,” explained Beth Goldberg, co-author of the study and Head of Research and Development for Google’s Jigsaw unit. “Teaching people about techniques like ad-hominem attacks that set out to manipulate them can help build resilience to believing and spreading misinformation in the future.”

The research team, which includes scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol, conducted a series of experiments involving short educational videos. These videos explain common manipulation techniques such as emotional language, false dichotomies, and incoherence—tactics frequently employed to spread misinformation.

“Propaganda, lies and misdirections are nearly always created from the same playbook,” said Professor Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol, who co-authored the study. “We developed the videos by analyzing the rhetoric of demagogues, who deal in scapegoating and false dichotomies.”

This preemptive approach may offer significant advantages over traditional debunking. The researchers argue that fact-checking after falsehoods spread is not only impossible to scale effectively but can sometimes backfire by entrenching conspiracy beliefs among those who already accept misinformation.

“Fact-checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online,” Lewandowsky noted. “We need to teach people to recognize the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled.”

The research involved six controlled experiments with 6,464 participants. Data collection was comprehensive, accounting for demographics, political leanings, education levels, and psychological factors such as susceptibility to conspiracy thinking and personality traits.

Results were impressive: participants who watched the inoculation videos were nearly twice as effective at identifying false dichotomies and more than twice as effective at spotting incoherence techniques compared to control groups. The videos also improved participants’ confidence in their ability to detect misinformation and led to better decisions about sharing potentially harmful content.

To test the approach in real-world conditions, researchers conducted an unprecedented experiment on YouTube. Google’s Jigsaw unit exposed approximately 5.4 million U.S. YouTube users to inoculation videos placed in pre-roll advertisement slots. Nearly one million viewers watched for at least 30 seconds, and a random sample received test questions within 24 hours of viewing.

Even in YouTube’s distracting environment, the ability to recognize manipulation techniques increased by 5% on average among those who watched the videos. While no direct comparison exists for such a novel experiment, Google notes that typical increases in brand awareness from YouTube advertising—known as “brand lift”—are typically limited to 1% in similar surveys.

“Users participated in tests around 18 hours on average after watching the videos, so the inoculation appears to have stuck,” said Dr. Sander van der Linden, a lead researcher on the project.

Perhaps most remarkably, the intervention proved extremely cost-effective. The average cost per significant view was just $0.05, suggesting that scaling up such prebunking efforts across social platforms could be both affordable and impactful.

Dr. Jon Roozenbeek, another researcher involved in the study, emphasized the practical implications: “If anyone wants to pay for a social media campaign that measurably reduces susceptibility to misinformation across millions of users, they can do so, and at a miniscule cost per view.”

The research represents a potential paradigm shift in addressing the misinformation crisis. Rather than playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with individual false claims, prebunking aims to build societal resilience against manipulation techniques broadly—potentially immunizing millions against deception before harmful narratives can take hold.