A study by researchers at University of Kent, Moonshot, Google Jigsaw LLC and University of Cambridge investigated the effectiveness of short prebunking videos for reducing the impact of misinformation.

Results suggest that prebunking can make people more cautious about content they encounter. The team also found that longer videos appeared to be more effective and the educational background of viewers influenced the videos’ effectiveness. This is based on “innoculation theory” which asserts that people can be protected against certain kinds of persuasion by hearing refutation of the misinformation before they are exposed.

Moonshot, Google and Jigsaw developed and tested the largest video prebunking campaign to date on YouTube prior to the 2024 June European parliament elections. The purpose was to improve audience recognition of three information manipulation tactics – scapegoating, discrediting, and decontextualization.

To test the effects of the prebunking videos, researchers ran an international survey, which allowed them to understand the factors that influenced a video’s effectiveness. Surveys were run in 12 nations within the European Union, including Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain. They were translated into 13 languages and reached a total of 19,735 people.

After the participants viewed the prebunking videos, they were shown posts or statements that either used or did not use the misinformation tactics flagged in the videos. They were asked to rate the manipulativeness of this content or to select the type of tactic used from a list.

“While a lot of work has demonstrated that prebunking is relatively effective in general, our paper allowed us to dig deeper into how consistent these effects were across nations,” lead researcher Mikey Biddlestone of University of Kent told Phys.org.

The full paper “Video inoculation against election misinformation across 12 EU nations” is available here.