Manipulation tactics – create an inoculation campaign

Inoculation – or prebunking – is one way to help people avoid being manipulated by online content. This activity uses five short videos that inoculate against common misinformation techniques and logical fallacies of:

• emotionally manipulative language

• incoherence

• false dichotomy

• scapegoating

• ad hominem attacks.

The videos have been crafted without a focus on a specific issue or topic – the focus is on the techniques and how to spot them.

After learning about the techniques, students are invited to create an inoculation campaign of their own.

Scapegoating as a manipulation technique

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Scapegoating is when a person or a group is singled out for unjustified blame for a significant or complex problem.

Video still from Inoculation Science. Courtesy of the University of Cambridge, University of Bristol and Jigsaw (a unit of Google.)

Rights: Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, Department of Psychology

Inoculation and prebunking explained

The inoculation theory is analogous to a medical inoculation – the way in which a vaccine uses weak doses to trigger an immune response. Using the inoculation theory as a strategy to recognise misinformation ‘immunises’ or helps us become resistant to deceptive or manipulative influences or information.

In medicine, widespread inoculation builds herd immunity (resilience against a disease). Using inoculation theory to help people build resilience against misinformation builds a type of mental or social herd immunity.

Prebunking is a form of inoculation theory. It targets misinformation using harmless examples. It is the opposite of debunking – exposing false claims. Debunking draws attention to false claims, which can help claims spread widely due to digital algorithms. Algorithms also mean debunked, fact-checked information is unlikely to reach the people most likely to believe the misinformation.

And on a practical note, prebunking may be a preferred use of limited classroom time – the cascade of misinformation makes it difficult to challenge or debunk claims as they arrive.

About the videos

The five videos used in this activity were created by Truth Labs for Education, a collaboration between Cambridge University, the University of Bristol and Google Jigsaw. Each video runs for less than 2 minutes. They use clips from movies and animated television series to illustrate manipulation techniques rather than real-life contexts.

In this activity, students watch videos and use a template to analyse the inoculation messages they explain. Students then use the template to plan and create their own inoculation campaigns.

By the end of this activity, students should be able to:

• watch the videos to gain information about common manipulation techniques

• discuss and clarify the meaning of vocabulary, jargon or phrases used in the videos

• discuss how the videos use the fictional characters to get their messages across to the viewers

• discuss examples of the techniques they have countered in online content

• use a template to analyse the videos and record their ideas

• use the same template to plan an inoculation campaign of their own using a context of their choice.

Download the Word file (see link below).