Psychologists Susan A. Nolan and Michael Kimball of the “Misinformation Desk” at Psychology Today offered to introduce us to prebunking in 2021: “It’s better to inoculate against disinformation than to debunk later.”

The idea behind “prebunking” is called inoculation theory: A small amount of a virus can help our bodies build antibodies against future exposure to that virus. In a similar way, exposure to the workings of disinformation can help build resistance to future exposure to disinformation. We develop skills to make sense of the deluge of information that is our online life.

Susan A. Nolan, Michael Kimball, “What Is Prebunking?,” Psychology Today, August 27, 2021

Here’s an example:

Curiously, Nolan and Kimball don’t address the fact that prebunking, as shown above, would work just as well for “inoculating” people against correct information. For example, sometimes there are only two reasonable choices, or maybe only one.

The main problem with prebunking

In 2021, much information about COVID that came from the highest levels turned out to need a lot of correction. And much that was decried as misinformation was either fact or reasonable inference.

Prebunking seems to rely on the assumption that whatever comes from the government or another authority is to be treated, when in conflict with other sources, as truth or fact. And other sources should be downgraded accordingly. That is not a standard for a free society — and certainly not a science-minded one. But the prebunkers forge on, convinced that they have found a touchstone at last.

Prebunkers offer five categories of clues that are supposed to help us identify misinformation: emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating and ad-hominem attacks.

It is no feat of memory to recall that, during controversies around COVID for example, there were plenty of instances of all those categories on both sides of conflicts. Prebunking probably teaches the viewer respond with disbelief to the specific claims presented. Courses in logic and critical thinking would be much a better use of the viewer’s time.

A 2022 research report claims that the technique is effective. Maybe, but if the claims presented for prebunking are all on one side, there is an older term for what the researchers are doing: propaganda. Thus, it’s no surprise that the technique is effective; well-executed propaganda very often is.

Prebunking vs. debunking

Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association offered a formal explanation of the thinking behind the current enthusiasm for prebunking: Debunking, they say, doesn’t work

Debunking, or fact-checking, is the correction of misinformation. It is used after people are exposed to misinformation, and it is most successful when it includes a detailed explanation that refutes incorrect information and replaces it with facts. Research indicates that debunking is effective in laboratory and real-world settings, as well as across cultures—particularly in the short term. However, fact-checking is very time-consuming and may not fully reverse the effects of misinformation; it also fades over time in ways that may require repeated correction. In real-world use, debunking efforts have not always reached their intended targets, partly because people who are predisposed to believe misinformation tend to avoid correction. Debunking interventions may work best in specific situations or individuals, so further research is required.

“What interventions can be used to counter misinformation effectively?,” March 1, 2024

In short, people — for a variety of reasons — may choose not to believe the debunkers. But the underlying assumption here is that the debunkers are Correct. Anyone who has covered the claims and counterclaims of a political campaign will know what nonsense that is.

The Association goes on to say, “It remains to be seen if prebunking works under all conditions and across cultures, but it has strong potential to forestall misinformation at scale.” Quite likely, the reason it is currently thought to have such “strong potential” is that it is too new to have clearly failed yet.

In “pre-bunking the trend toward pre-bunking,” El Gato Malo (known, admittedly, for “bad cattitude”) comments on Ursula Von der Leyen’s EU statements on the global threat posed by misinformation: “this is essentially a soup to nuts justification framework for informational manipulation.”

Which goes on all the time. We take propaganda like that for granted. A problem arises when we are supposed to class it as a form of truth simply because it comes from the government or some other authoritative body. COVID, among other things, taught us better. Anyway, the main point of a free society is to avoid that sort of thing as much as possible.

Prebunking or debunking are not problems in themselves — but what follows is

These propaganda techniques disguised as a search for truth are symptoms of an underlying problem, seen clearly in growing government attempts to control the news stream.

Here’s the difficulty: What will government, pundits, opinion leaders, and self-appointed moral guardians do when — as happened in Canada with the truckers’ Convoy protesting the COVID lockdowns — much of the public simply refuses to go on pretending to believe government “truths” that have become unbelievable?

The current Canadian government has a historically low level of popularity. That may not be a direct result of its Convoy crackdown. Perhaps it is better seen as the outcome of the government attitudes that brought the Convoy on.

A government consumed with a sense of its own correctness and inevitability adopts oppressive measures to stay in power. Attempts at thought control like prebunking will surely be one of the instruments. When those methods don’t work, as prebunking is sure not to work when it does not square with lived reality, oppression may follow.

Predictably, CBS 60 Minutes warned us recently, “the political debate around content moderation has had a chilling effect on social media companies’ willingness to expand and implement new ‘prebunking’ initiatives.” But then, the public is the social medium’s audience, not its subjects. Stay tuned.