Critical thinking skills are much healthier to teach people than simply telling them what ideas experts say are true and which Lord of the Rings prequels it is bigoted not to enjoy and whether (as an October 2020 Politico headline read) “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” Giving people the tools to think for themselves is a good thing. Teach a man to fish and all that. So, I was interested to see an NBC News write-up of a study in the journal Science Advances about a campaign to raise informal logic education in newsreaders.
The new study, NBC says, is “part of a broad effort by tech companies, academics and news organizations to find new ways to rebuild media literacy, as other approaches such as traditional fact-checking have failed to make a dent in online misinformation.” (Note, please, the important admission there.) Is there any more sinister collection of words than “broad effort by tech companies, academics, and news organizations”? They call their new approach “pre-bunking,” and per NBC, “interest in ‘pre-bunking’ misinformation has been percolating for a few years. Twitter used ‘pre-bunking’ on subjects including ballot security in the days leading up to the 2020 election, while Facebook and Snapchat put resources into voter education. Other efforts have focused on COVID misinformation.” But pre-bunking, like the sham version of “fact-checking” we now hear so much about, is a form of information control in which the never-ending process by which a society determines what is true is rendered undemocratic. It is about controlling and limiting opinion, not about accurately assessing information.
Here is what the researchers did: They created videos that run before YouTube content using the fact that one of the researchers involved is from Google, which owns YouTube. They found that showing a captive audience online videos using pop culture figures such as Homer Simpson and concepts such as the false choice fallacy helps “inoculate” people from believing bad things, such as that Ukrainian immigrants are a threat to them. They have decided post-study to roll these videos out in Poland to help diminish anti-Ukrainian immigrant sentiment.
I personally could not agree more with their political view that Ukrainian immigrants deserve a warm welcome wherever they unfortunately have to flee, but at least I recognize my own view as a political claim, and I know enough to think Polish support for Ukraine has already been pleasingly strong. Perhaps you see the problems here. “We can in a very apolitical way help people gain resistance to manipulation online,” Beth Goldberg, the Google employee who worked on this research, said. Well, this isn’t apolitical — it’s just hiding its politics. Per the study’s lead author, “Words like ‘fact-checking’ themselves are becoming politicized, and that’s a problem, so you need to find a way around that.” But the word “fact-checking” isn’t getting politicized. The thing is.
Much as all “misinformation” researchers invented was a scary new word for the very old concept known as “lying,” this new frontier in Telling People What to Think Studies has done nothing new. All they have invented is an ad. We already knew online political ads existed and worked well when prioritized and made unskippable by the YouTube algorithm, didn’t we? That’s not science. There’s no need to invent the word “pre-bunking” for that. Anyway, the word “debunking” is a word for getting rid of bunk. Therefore, doing some critical thinking, pre-bunking would logically just be a word for putting some bunk first.
