Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19

"Prevention is better than cure. This is true as much for diseases as it is for the spread of misinformation."

In the absence (to date) of an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19, researchers have proposed that managing the pandemic response will require leveraging insights from the social and behavioural sciences. Such insights, for example, could help shape efforts to contain the potentially harmful spread of misinformation about the novel coronavirus. This article details the nature, extent, and ramifications of the problem, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed an "infodemic". In response, the authors examine the theory of psychological inoculation ("prebunking") as a way to confer large-scale psychological resistance against fake news.

To begin, the article examines the scope and reach of misinformation about COVID-19 in the general population, focusing on the role social media has played in what has become a widespread problem. A complicating factor is that, due to the novel nature of COVID-19, insights about the causes of and treatments for the virus emerge over time, so it isn't always obvious what is blatantly false (misinformation). Various studies cited here indicate that misinformation can distort people's risk perception, leading them to question the need to adopt preventative health behaviours and/or to express hesitancy about a possible future COVID-19 vaccine.

As the authors explain, given the practical challenges of fact-checking and the difficulty of correcting misinformation after it has already spread, proactive approaches such as prebunking (i.e., preemptive debunking) are gaining traction. In brief, the theory of psychological inoculation evokes the practice of vaccination in suggesting that a strong challenge to a person's worldview (e.g., a conspiracy theory) can be introduced in a weakened state so that it will trigger critical thinking and other protective responses. For example, in a study on misinformation about climate change, participants were forewarned that some political actors try to mislead people on the issue, and they were then provided with facts and arguments to refute the misinformation (akin to presenting a weakened virus in a medical vaccine) before they were exposed to a full dose of misinformation later on.

As in the case of medical vaccination, on conventional (prophylactic) inoculation theory, a healthy state (e.g., belief in the validity of public health guidelines) needs to already be in place. Efforts to strengthen that person's attitudinal defenses will be designed to decrease the potency of misinformation attacks. Scholars have also described a therapeutic application of inoculation theory, whereby audiences who have already been afflicted with an "informational virus" (thus, not in a healthy state) are inoculated.

It need not always be an external entity who does the inoculating; the idea behind active inoculation is that people are empowered to generate their own "antibodies" against misinformation. For example, in the online game Bad News, players take on the role of a fake news creator and learn about 6 common misinformation techniques over the course of 6 levels, or "badges". The inoculation component of the game consists of a combination of warnings about fake news and pre-exposure to weakened doses of the techniques used in the production of fake news. One study found that Bad News significantly improved players' ability to resist misinformation techniques after gameplay and increased their confidence in spotting misleading information.

The authors altered Bad News to feature weakened doses of conspiracies about the novel coronavirus to expose how misinformation is created, spread, and shared. On this adaptation, players are tasked with inventing and spreading a fake conspiracy theory about COVID-19; they then learn about the negative consequences of their actions in the form of replies by social media users in their network. Another practical application of inoculation theory in the context of COVID-19 misinformation is the online game Go Viral! Developed by Cambridge University's Social Decision Making Lab in collaboration with the United Kingdom government and the WHO, the game is designed to teach players to resist 3 manipulation techniques commonly used to spread misinformation about the coronavirus (fearmongering, the use of fake experts, and conspiracy theories).

Regardless of the game/approach, the authors stress that "it is not necessary for every single individual to receive the 'vaccine': if enough people have developed antibodies against the techniques used to spread misinformation about COVID-19, in theory, societal herd immunity could be achieved."

In concluding, the authors suggest that "COVID-19 health messaging can harness both ways in which inoculation theory is used to protect healthier beliefs and actions: building resistance to unhealthy influence, like conspiracy theories, and encouraging healthier behaviors, like social distancing and wearing a mask in public." They "look forward to future research on both prophylactic and therapeutic applications of psychological inoculation in the context of COVID-19."