Inside Google’s plans to combat election disinformation in the EU

“We are all at risk of online manipulation right now.”

So begins a short animated video about a practice known as decontextualization and how it can be used to misinform people online. The video identifies signs to look out for, including surprising or unusual content, seemingly untrustworthy sources, or video or audio that appears to have been manipulated or repurposed.

Although it may not seem like it, this 50-second video is actually an election ad – one of three that Google will launch in five European countries next month, ahead of the European Union’s June parliamentary elections. But unlike traditional election ads, designed to persuade people to vote, these seek to educate voters about how they can be fooled. It’s an initiative that Google describes as preventative unmasking – or, more simply, “pre-bunking”.

“It works like a vaccine,” Beth Goldberg, head of research at Google’s internal Jigsaw unit, which was founded in 2010 with the mission of tackling threats to open societies, tells TIME. By allowing potential voters to recognize common manipulation techniques that could be used to mislead them – such as scapegoating or polarization – Goldberg says prebunking “helps people proactively gain mental defenses.”

Concerns about AI-generated misinformation and the impact it will have on elections around the world continue to dominate this year’s electoral megacycle. This is particularly true in the EU, which recently approved a new law forcing technology companies to increase their efforts to crack down on misinformation amid concerns that an increase in Russian propaganda could distort the results.

Contrary to what one might expect, prebunking ads are not overtly political nor do they make any allusion to specific candidates or parties. In the video about decontextualization, for example, viewers are shown a hypothetical scenario in which an AI-generated video of a lion loose in a city square is used to fuel fear and panic. In another video, this time about scapegoating, an incident is shown in which a community blames another group (in this case, tourists) for litter in their parks, without exploring other possible causes.

The beauty of this approach, notes Goldberg, is that it doesn’t need to be specific. “It doesn’t have to be actual disinformation; you can just show someone how manipulation works,” she says, noting that keeping the content general and focusing on manipulation strategies rather than misinformation itself allows these campaigns to reach people regardless of their political orientation.

While Google’s prebunking campaign is relatively new, the tactic is not. In fact, the concept dates back to the 1960s, when social psychologist William McGuire sought to understand people’s susceptibility to propaganda during the Cold War and whether they could be defended against it. This culminated in what McGuire called “inoculation theory”, which was based on the premise that false narratives, like viruses, can be contagious and that, by inoculating people with a dose of facts, they can become less susceptible. But it was only decades later that the theory began to be applied to online information. In recent years, Jigsaw has conducted pre-bunking initiatives in Eastern Europe It is Indonesia. Its next European campaign, which formally kicks off in May, will be disseminated mainly in the form of small ads on the YouTube and Meta platforms, aimed at voters in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Poland. Afterward, viewers will be asked to complete a brief multiple-choice survey, testing their ability to identify the manipulation technique featured in the ad.

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While prebunking doesn’t necessarily face as much resistance as more conventional ways of combating misinformation, like fact-checking or content moderation, which some critics have compared to censorship, it’s also not a panacea. Jon Roozenbeek, an assistant professor of psychology and security at King’s College London who spent years working with Jigsaw on pre-bunking, tells TIME that one of the biggest challenges in these campaigns is ensuring the videos are captivating enough to hold viewers’ attention. . Even if they do, he adds, “you can’t really expect miracles in the sense that suddenly, after one of these videos, people start behaving completely differently online.” he says. “It is too much to expect from a psychological intervention as mild as this.”

That’s not to say pre-bunking doesn’t have an impact. In previous campaigns, post-announcement surveys showed that the percentage of individuals who could correctly identify a manipulation technique increased by up to 5% after watching a pre-bunking video. “We have no doubt that the effect is real; just discuss whether it is big enough,” says Roozenbeek. “That’s the main discussion we’re having.”

While Jigsaw has led pre-bunking efforts, they are not the only ones utilizing this approach. In the US, the Biden administration has sought to combat Russian disinformation in part by declassifying intelligence that predicted the types of narratives it predicted the Kremlin would use, especially in the run-up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then , this practice has spread to China (where the US government used declassified materials to predict potential Chinese provocations in the Taiwan Strait) and Iran (the US declassified intelligence alleging that Tehran had transferred drones and cruise missiles to Houthi militants in the Yemen that were being used to attack ships in the Red Sea). What the White House classified as strategic declassification is just a pretext by another name.

Working with academics and civil society organizations across the 27 EU member states, Jigsaw’s latest prebunking campaign is expected to be its largest and most collaborative effort yet. And in an election that will see hundreds of millions of voters go to the polls to choose which electoral project could be the Far-right European Parliament todaythe stakes couldn’t be higher.