“Debunking is especially difficult with conspiracy theories, which are often believed at an emotional, rather than rational, level,” wrote Beth Goldberg, research program manager at Jigsaw, a Google unit that confronts emerging threats to open societies. When Jigsaw interviewed dozens of conspiracy theory propagators, “we found that their deeply-held beliefs … were resistant to rational or factual counter-arguments” from experts, family, or friends.
To be sure, various approaches are needed to combat disinformation, including doctors providing science-based information to patients, health systems posting clear facts on easy-to-find web pages, and social media companies removing blatantly untrue posts.
But “a purely reactive mode is not appropriate,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf, MD, wrote recently this year in a memo to staff that prioritized finding new ways to counter health misinformation. The U.S. surgeon general, in an advisory last year, called for measures to “equip Americans with the tools to identify misinformation” when it reaches them.
Getting Beyond Just the Facts
Stoking fear. Blaming scapegoats. Exaggerating partisan grievances. Sowing doubts about scientific consensus. Those are among the common tactics used in disinformation campaigns about all sorts of issues, from health to politics to culture, going back decades. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, for example, tobacco companies funded sham studies and ran ad campaigns to sow public doubt about the scientific consensus that smoking causes cancer. Fast forward to today, when attacking scientific consensus has been a tactic of disinformation about COVID-19. Researchers at American University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have identified the five most common tropes (i.e., narrative themes) in COVID-19 disinformation as “corrupt elites,” “vaccine injury,” “sinister origins,” “freedom under siege,” and “health freedom.”
Those frameworks make for influential messaging, as evidenced by their success at stirring up confusion, distrust, and conflict. But the techniques also present a vulnerability. Exposing people to the common tactics of disinformation messages, regardless of the issue that those messages target, is simpler and more scalable than trying to debunk a never-ending plethora of specific deceitful claims. Researchers have found that educating people about standard disinformation tactics makes them more likely to reject disinformation that they subsequently read or hear about such issues as climate change, agricultural biotechnology, and anti-vaccine conspiracies.