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.