Late last year, a report was published that ranked countries according to their resilience to misinformation. At first, when I searched for the United Kingdom, I couldn’t find it – because I was looking at the top end of the list. In fact, the UK didn’t make the top 10 – it was in the second tier, coming in at number 13, well below many western European countries.
Where are we going wrong? The report relied on several well-known indices to determine a country’s level of resilience to fake news, including freedom of the press, societal trust and national education levels. Finland topped the table, and has received international praise for its outstanding approach to fighting fake news. A thriving democracy – like Finland’s – is characterised by high levels of trust, an educated citizenry, as well as freedom of the press. Unfortunately, according to the report, the UK got downgraded on all of these indicators, thanks to declining levels of trust and increasing concerns about threats to journalism and media freedom. Yet, the biggest differentiator in the ranking has to do with media literacy and education.
One major difference between Finland and the UK is how many people attend higher education: a staggering 93% of the Finnish population compared with 66% of the UK population. But some of the biggest weights in the index are given to the OECD’s reading and scientific literacy scores. Reading literacy involves, among other skills, assessing the quality and credibility of information. Although in absolute terms the UK is not doing badly, it significantly lags Finland on both these measures. This is important – we know from our own research in the UK that lower levels of numerical literacy are a good predictor of an individual’s susceptibility to misinformation.
Given that the UK has been made vulnerable by these social and educational factors, it’s vital that we work out how to fight misinformation more effectively. If you look closer at what Finland is doing in terms of media literacy education, there’s a much larger lesson to be learned. Finland shares an 800-mile border with Russia. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Finland started to preemptively teach students across the country how to spot misinformation and manipulation, long before “fake news” became common vernacular. In short, their approach has been proactive rather than reactive.
As a scientist who studies how the mind deals with misinformation (in both the lab and in practice), this fits in with everything I’ve learned about how to fight it. Trying to undo the influence of misinformation once it’s already out there is an uphill battle. For one, we know that people continue to rely on falsehoods long after they have been debunked (think of the false and persistent myth, originally spread by a British doctor, that linked the MMR vaccine to autism). There’s also a major practical issue: misinformation can be spread within seconds, but it takes days, if not weeks, to craft a good factcheck. As one study showed, falsehoods travel faster than the truth – a lie can make its way around the world before the truth has had a chance to put its shoes on.
But what if there was a way to prevent falsehoods from sticking in the first place? I have been studying a potential antidote known as psychological inoculation or “prebunking”. The process follows the vaccine analogy: by “injecting” people with a weakened dose of misinformation (or the techniques used to spread misinformation) and by equipping them to fight off manipulation, people can build up cognitive immunity so that when they are later exposed to the full dose of misinformation, they can recognise and resist it.
At the start of the pandemic we created a social media simulation called GoViral! which forewarned people about the dangers of misinformation about Covid-19. Players learn about the building blocks of a conspiracy theory, how fake experts are used to peddle fake cures and how bad actors can manipulate our emotions by appealing to fear and outrage. In the game, players are confronted with a fake expert by the name of Dr Isley, who has a degree in naturopathy from the University of Camford (a fake institution) and tries to convince people in his chat group that the government is hiding the fact that no deaths have been caused by Covid-19. Randomized trials showed that the approach is effective in helping people spot misinformation.
In another recent study, we developed animated videos on YouTube that inoculate people against the strategies used to spread misinformation. One classic example is a “false dilemma” such as “either you join Islamic State or you’re not a good Muslim” or “we need to fix domestic problems first before we can help immigrants”. In one video, people are confronted with a weakened dose of the “false dilemma” technique in the form of a clip from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. In the segment, Obi-Wan confronts Anakin Skywalker who claims, “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy!” To which Obi-Wan replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”. Key to these approaches is the fact that they are non-political: instead they help people recognise techniques that are used to mislead.
Back to Finland. Its approach is not standardised, but one thing is clear: Finland is pre-emptively preparing its population to spot propaganda and manipulation. If the UK is to win the war on misinformation, we are going to need to become proactive, not just reactive. This means teaching these methods in schools and universities. After all, if enough people in the population are inoculated, misinformation will no longer have a chance to spread.
Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and Author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity
