Inside Googles plans to fight EU election misinformation

We are now at risk of being manipulated online.

So begins a short animated video about a practice known as decontextualization and how it is used to misinform people online. This video identifies warning signs to look out for, including surprising or unusual content, seemingly unreliable sources, or video or audio that appears to have been manipulated or reused.

It may not seem like it, but this 50-second video is actually a compilation of three elections Google will be rolling out in five European countries next month ahead of June's European Union parliamentary elections. . But unlike traditional election ads that aim to persuade people how to vote, these seek to educate voters about how they can be misled. Google describes this as proactive fallacy debunking, or more simply, proactive fallacy debunking.

It works like a vaccine, Beth Goldberg, head of research at Google's in-house Jigsaw unit, created in 2010 with a mandate to address threats to open societies, told TIME. By helping prospective voters recognize common manipulation techniques that can be used to mislead them, such as scapegoating and polarization, Goldberg helps people become proactive. He says it helps him gain mental protection.

Concerns about AI-generated disinformation and its impact on elections around the world continue to dominate this year's electoral megacycle. This is especially true in the European Union, which recently passed a new law requiring tech companies to step up efforts to crack down on disinformation over concerns that increased Russian propaganda could skew the results.

Contrary to expectations, the pre-banking ads are not overtly political and do not allude to any particular candidate or party. For example, in a video about decontextualization, viewers are shown a hypothetical scenario in which an AI-generated video of a lion released in a town square is used to incite fear and panic. Another video, this time about scapegoating, shows an incident in which a community places the blame for trash in a park solely on another group (in this case tourists) without looking into other possible causes. ing.

The advantage of this approach, Goldberg points out, is that it doesn't have to be specific. It doesn't have to be actual misinformation. All you need to do is show someone how manipulation works, she says, and by keeping the content general and focusing on the manipulation strategy rather than the misinformation itself, you can improve the relationship between political persuasion and political persuasion. He points out that these campaigns will reach more people than others.

Google's advance fraud campaigns are relatively new, but this tactic is not. In fact, the origins of this concept date back to his 1960s. At the time, social psychologist William McGuire sought to understand whether people were susceptible to and able to protect themselves from propaganda during the Cold War. This culminated in what McGuire called the “vaccination theory.'' This theory was based on the premise that false stories, like viruses, can be contagious and that inoculating people with a certain amount of facts can make them less susceptible. However, it wasn't until decades later that this theory began to be applied to online information. In recent years, Jigsaw has implemented pre-banking initiatives in Eastern Europe and Indonesia. The upcoming European campaign, which officially launches in May, will be run as short ads on YouTube and Metaplatform, primarily targeting voters in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Poland. Viewers are then asked to take part in a short multiple-choice survey that tests their ability to identify the manipulative techniques featured in the ad.

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Pre-fabrication doesn't necessarily face the same resistance as traditional forms of combating misinformation, such as fact-checking and content moderation, which some critics liken to censorship, but it's also not a panacea. John Ruthenbeek, assistant professor of psychology and security at King's College London, has been working with Jigsaw on proactive deception research for years, and says one of the biggest challenges in these campaigns is: It's about making sure the video is engaging enough to grab the viewer's attention, he told TIME. Even if that happens, he added, we can't really expect miracles in the sense that people will start behaving completely differently online after watching one of these videos. he says. It would be unreasonable to expect too much from such a light-touch psychological intervention.

This is not to say that advance banking has no impact. In previous campaigns, post-ad research showed that the percentage of people who correctly identified the manipulation technique increased by up to 5% after watching the pre-deception video. There was no doubt that the effect was real. That's all you can argue about whether it's big enough, Luzenbeek said. That was the main discussion.

While Jigsaw has been leading the way in pre-banking efforts, it is not alone in using this approach. In the United States, the Biden administration will seek to counter Russian disinformation, especially by declassifying information about what rhetoric it expects the Kremlin to use in the run-up to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Moscow in 2022. It is said that The practice has since expanded to include China (the US government used declassified material to predict potential Chinese provocations in the Taiwan Strait) and Iran (Tehran has targeted Yemen's Houthi militants with drones and cruise missiles). The US declassified intelligence agency claims that it was transferred and used in the United States). to attack ships in the Red Sea). What the White House claims is strategic declassification is simply disguised under a different name.

In collaboration with academics and civil society organizations from 27 EU member states, Jigsaw's latest pre-banking campaign is set to be its largest and most collaborative effort to date. And in an election where hundreds of millions of voters will go to the polls to choose what could be today's most far-right European Parliament, the stakes could not be higher.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://time.com/6970488/google-jigsaw-eu-elections-misinformation-prebunking/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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