<p>In what must be the latest effort to &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/time-well-funded-cabal-of-powerful-people-saved-democracy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">fortify</a>&#8221; future elections, it seems that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/social-media" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Big Tech</a> is ablaze with the idea of &#8220;pre-bunking&#8221; —using a proactive campaign to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/social-media-censorship" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pre-empt political narratives</a> that could supposedly lead to disinformation.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, Google released a new study that claimed showing simple cartoons discussing things like how ad hominem attacks are bad could ward off gullible rubes from believing things that are not true, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/google-trying-pre-bunking-effort-counter-misinformation-rcna43818">according</a> to NBC News. The leaders of the study also found that changing which words are used to discuss facts could also lead to better results for those who want to <del datetime="2022-08-25T14:09:20+00:00">control the narrative</del> protect safe and secure elections.</p>
<p class="">“Words like ‘fact-checking’ themselves are becoming politicized, and that’s a problem, so you need to find a way around that,” Jon Roozenbeek, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University’s <a href="https://www.sdmlab.psychol.cam.ac.uk/">Social Decision-Making Lab</a>, told NBC.</p>
<p>So for example, instead of seeing an ad just prior to a YouTube video, individuals might see a cartoon for 10 seconds talking about a broad topic. The idea is to &#8220;inoculate&#8221; the viewer, similar to a vaccine, NBC News explained.</p>
<p>&#8220;Each video instantiates the inoculation procedure by first providing a forewarning of an impending misinformation attack, then issuing a preemptive refutation of the manipulation technique used in this attack, and lastly presenting a &#8216;microdose&#8217; of misinformation in the form of innocuous and humorous examples (such as an example of incoherence from the animated television series Family Guy),&#8221; the study <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo6254" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>.</p>
<p>&#8220;All examples are nonpolitical and fictitious, in addition to being humorous, to avoid any appearance of partisan bias and prevent triggering defensive motivated cognition,&#8221; the study claimed.</p>
<p>Google — which owns YouTube — does not have plans to use this sort of thing in the immediate future,  but Twitter does for the upcoming midterm election.</p>
<p>Earlier this month, the social media giant <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-activates-steps-to-protect-midterms-fight-misleading-narratives" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> that it was &#8220;activating enforcement&#8221; steps to combat “harmful misleading information.” In the run-up to November 8, Twitter will be rolling out various measures, including blocking certain accounts from sharing links or content that the company deems false.</p>
<p>The way Twitter explained it is that it simply wants to &#8220;enable healthy civic conversation on Twitter, while ensuring people have the context they need to make informed decisions.&#8221;</p>
<p>Twitter wants to deploy pre-bunks &#8220;to get ahead of misleading narratives on Twitter, and to proactively address topics that may be the subject of misinformation.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Over the coming months, [Twitter will] place prompts directly on people’s timelines in the US and in Search when people type related terms, phrases, or hashtags,&#8221; Twitter announced.</p>
<p>Likewise, the social media company will be “educating” users on how to identify fake news.</p>
<p>“Keep an eye on @TwitterSafety for media literacy tips and suggestions, like how to spot misinformation, which were developed in partnership with educational experts,” Twitter said.</p>
<p>So for example — and believe me, I am just spitballing here — pretend there exists a news story about a presidential candidate&#8217;s son&#8217;s laptop being left at a hardware store in his home state. That laptop might be reportedly filled with thousands of lurid images and texts  — even showing potential family corruption including the presidential candidate.</p>
<p>Then let us say — I don&#8217;t know — 50-some-odd intelligence community officials <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/really-former-cia-director-agrees-gop-is-most-dangerous-group-around-which-explains-a-lot" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sign a letter</a> saying that the news story is fake and Russian disinformation.</p>
<p>In the past, perhaps social media giants might have blocked users from sharing that link or suspended others for repeated attempts.</p>
<p>Well, in the future, Big Tech might use a &#8220;pre-bunk&#8221; so you can spot Russian disinformation and in doing so discredit that story.</p>
<p>Now down the road, perhaps major legacy media companies get around to &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-rest-of-the-country-is-starting-to-open-their-eyes-major-outlets-confirm-contents-of-hunters-laptop" target="_blank" rel="noopener">verifying</a>&#8221; the original story, but the online arbiters of truth will cross that bridge when we get to it.</p>
<p>That is one possibility of what the <del datetime="2022-08-25T15:20:08+00:00">2020 election</del> future could look like.</p>
<p>Just remember, Big Tech isn&#8217;t in the censorship business. It is in the protecting democracy business and moving toward the pre-bunking business (<em>wink, wink</em>).</p>
<p><em>The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.</em></p>

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Pre-Bunking: The Social Media Censorship Crowd’s Latest Craze