Are you, like me, under the impression that the annoying, flashing screen banners that squeeze themselves between the daily news hardly affect you? Do you consider yourself a critical reader of what social media is telling you? A reader who knows both sides of the spectrum and who effortlessly manages to form an excellent, balanced judgement? Congratulations: you think like everyone else. And you are wrong.
Even if you never click on commercials and take all information with a sensible digital grain of salt, it is impossible to stay completely free from the effects of advertising talk and misinformation in this day and age. No matter how fast the lie is… the truth is that the truth is behaving more slowly than ever. So slow that there is no guarantee that she will ever catch up with the lie.
Enter: debunk. Fact checkers are increasingly turning to checking information in written documents and even during speeches or debates for factual inaccuracies. The word has its origin in the American bunkum which in 1900 meant ‘nonsense’. Bunkum is, in turn, a phonetic misspelling of Buncombe, a district of North Carolina where in the 19th century politician Felix Walker refused to cut off his dull speech because he was about to say something very interesting. That turned out to be utter nonsense. Bunkumso, in Buncombe.
Educational videos
In 1923, the verb debunken was popularized by the novel Bunk by American journalist William Woodward (sorry, not related to Bob). It got another boost in Harold U. Faulkner’s (no, not that Faulkner) article in Harper’s about debunking history. Unfortunately, Faulkner’s piece was in turn debunked not long after. Anyway, the irony couldn’t prevent the word from becoming more common in the 1920s.
Also read: How fake news lingers in your brain
Now, a century later, there is a new variant: prebunk – a kind of debunking on amphetamines. In a large-scale study conducted in science was published, scientists conducted a test among more than five million YouTube viewers. Via an advertisement, viewers were shown a video beforehand in which the operation of certain manipulative techniques was explained. Extremely emotional language, playing on the woman, presenting false dilemmas: everything was carefully explained in information films.
Viewers who first watched such a film turned out to be less susceptible to the subsequent advertisement or unfounded theory. The researchers even went so far as to describe the effect of prebunking as a ‘psychological vaccine’ against disinformation. A mini-dose of ad to neutralize the effect of the real ad. According to the optimistic scientists, the method is easy to roll out on a large scale, because it concerns universal manipulation techniques, not specific claims.
That sounds good. Perhaps prebunking offers some hope in the glory days of fake news, but the truth is that the lie is not only faster, but often juicier and flashier. If prebunken really wants to give slow twentieth-century truth a boost (cough), well, then they’ll have to be damn flashy educational videos.