How charities can get ahead of fake news

Dealing with misinformation

‘Lies make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got it’s boots strapped on.’  

Although no one seems 100% sure who first said this, we all know the saying, right? And we know that this is one of the main reasons why it’s hard to correct fake news online. As misinformation travels at light speed across social media and the internet, many of the corrections struggle to catch up. 

If your charity is affected by fake news you will know first-hand how misinformation, from distortion to outright untruths, can hurt the individuals you work with. It can mislead the public about the issues you care about and in turn, damage your charity’s reputation.  

You may feel there is little or nothing you can do about this, considering the vast scale of misinformation that’s out there. And with Meta’s recent decision to remove fact checkers from their platforms, chaos in the information space has been supercharged, while the ability to debunk it shrinks.

But don’t despair!  

Academic research about a particular intervention may offer a good solution: pre-bunking.  

What is pre-bunking?

Pre-bunking is like a digital version of vaccination in medicine and public health. Vaccines work by exposing the body to a small, weakened does of the disease. The body then builds resistance making it ready to recognise and resist the same hostile invader when exposed to it.

Pre-bunking works the same way. It shows people a small example of misinformation, explains why it’s false, and shares the correct information instead.

Then, when exposed again to the misinformation, those ‘digitally vaccinated’ can recognise the misinformation and are less likely to believe it.

Examples of pre-bunking in action

Many organisations already use pre-bunking as a tool to tackle fake news. Piltch-Leob found that people who watched a video addressing misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine showed greater resistance to similar misinformation than those who had not seen the videos.

Similarly, Google pre-bunked misinformation about Ukrainian refugees across Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To get ahead of anti-migrant hate, Google and partners created six videos designed to prebunk two narratives that had begun to appear online – scapegoating Ukrainian refugees for the rising cost of living, and fear-mongering over the supposedly violent nature of refugees.

What can pre-bunking offer charities?

Pre-bunking offers a potentially powerful tool for charities to get ahead of misinformation. Rather than spending more money on communications that respond to fake news directly, it’s worth considering diverting the same resource towards strategies that are more likely to achieve proactive results.

Here’s some key questions to help you consider how pre-bunking might work for your charity.

1. What misinformation damages our charity or the people it helps? Is the misinformation about people, statistics, tropes, geographical facts, specific misconceptions?
2. Is there a cycle to the misinformation that affects our charity? Are there specific events that trigger lots of misinformation? For example, the school year, a particular holiday, an election.
3. Who voices the misinformation and who believes it? For example, politicians, particular publications, the general public, pressure groups.

Use your answers to plan, craft and execute the perfect pre-bunking message for your cause.

Pre-bunking won’t be right for every charity, and it may need some time to get the best results. But even if it changes a charity’s response to a press enquiry from ‘We’ll get a quote to you asap…’ to ‘We posted a fact check on this topic a month ago…take a look’, it can help charities demonstrate confidence and provide reassurance in confusing times.

Next steps

For more information on pre-bunking for charities, take a look at Janette’s simple ‘how to’ guide for how charities can get ahead of fake news.

Further reading

• Google’s own ‘Prebunking with Google‘
• Social media experiment reveals potential to ‘inoculate’ millions of users against misinformation, University of Cambridge
• Prebunking is effective at fighting misinfonformation, Poynter
• Misinformation review, Harvard Kennedy School