Snuffing out “misinformation” — and “malinformation” — in the womb, before it ever has a chance for public vetting, is obviously how we best exercise Democracy™.
Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’
Via Reuters (emphasis added):
Google (GOOGL.O)* is preparing to launch an anti-misinformation campaign across five countries in the European Union (EU), the company told Reuters ahead of the bloc's parliamentary elections and tougher new rules tackling online content.
*As an aside, why do corporate state media outlets like Reuters include publicly traded corporations’ ticker symbols in news stories, which apparently indicate some sort of endorsement or advertisement for its stock?
Continuing:
In June, EU citizens will elect a new European Parliament to pass policies and laws in the region and lawmakers fear the spread of misinformation online could sway voters.
France, Poland and Germany accused Russia on Monday of putting together an elaborate network of websites to spread pro-Russian propaganda.
Europe's Digital Services Act, which comes into force this week, will require very large online platforms and search engines to do more to tackle illegal content and risks to public security.
From this spring, Google's internal Jigsaw unit which operates to tackle threats to societies, will run a series of animated ads across platforms such as TikTok and YouTube in five EU countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland.
Building on previous campaigns the company has tested in Germany and central Europe, Jigsaw said the new project was an opportunity to reach citizens in countries with some of the largest number of voters in the EU, utilising the company's local expertise in these regions.
The ads will feature so-called "prebunking" techniques, developed in partnership with researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol, aimed at helping viewers identify manipulative content before encountering it…
"We've spent so much time having these really polarised debates. Our democracy is at stake, and the temperature just keeps getting higher and higher," said Beth Goldberg, head of research at Jigsaw.
"Prebunking is the only technique, at least that I've seen, that works equally effectively across the political spectrum," Goldberg said.
This is obviously a rhetorical question, but are we now at the point when preserving Democracy™ means the government is handed the power, no questions asked, to police and censor whatever information it deems undesirable for mass consumption?
“Pre-bunking” as a censorship practice has roots reaching back at least to 2020, as explained via Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review:
It has been shown that debunking and fact-checking can lack effectiveness because of the continued influence of misinformation: once people are exposed to a falsehood, it is difficult to correct (De keersmaecker & Roets, 2017; Lewandowsky et al., 2012). Overall, there is a lack of evidence-based educational materials to support citizens’ attitudes and abilities to resist misinformation (European Union, 2018; Wardle & Derakshan, 2017). Importantly, most research-based educational interventions do not reach beyond the classroom (Lee, 2018).
Inoculation theory is a framework from social psychology that posits that it is possible to pre-emptively confer psychological resistance against (malicious) persuasion attempts (Compton, 2013; McGuire & Papageorgis, 1961). This is a fitting analogy, because “fake news” can spread much like a virus (Kucharski, 2016; Vosoughi et al., 2018). In the context of vaccines, the body is exposed to a weakened dose of a pathogen—strong enough to trigger the immune system—but not so strong as to overwhelm the body. The same can be achieved with information by introducing pre-emptive refutations of weakened arguments, which help build cognitive resistance against future persuasion attempts. Meta-analyses have shown that inoculation theory is effective at reducing vulnerability to persuasion (Banas & Rains, 2010).
Is it merely a coincidence — a matter of convenient and apt analogy — that the governing authorities conflate “misinformation” with a virus, or is this seen as a valuable propagandistic tool given that large swathes of the public have been conditioned in recent years to recoil in reflexive terror at mention of viral infection a la COVID-19 terror?
