The Psychological Limits of Debunking Misinformation

The theory that kind of underlies a lot of our practical work here is this idea of psychological inoculation which follows the biomedical metaphor for analogy pretty much exactly. Just as vaccines trigger or at least vaccines introduced weekend or inactivated strains of a virus into the body then triggers the production of antibodies to help confer resistance against future infection it really turns out you can do the same with misinformation by preemptively exposing people and refuting weaken doses of falsehoods  that are used to spread misinformation. We didn't experiment with millions of people live on YouTube but actually were able to test that and found that that was one of the best things Google made possible.