Resource Best Practices For Prebunking Misinformation

2025 has brought with it the mainstreaming of misleading and deceptive narratives and practices to shape opinions and influence decision-making. Prebunking, a proactive approach that equips people with the tools to recognize falsehoods and manipulation before encountering it, has proven to be an effective strategy for building people's resilience to online harms. Drawing from DDIA’s 2024 research, including focus groups, polling, and experiments, the Prebunking Implementation Guide provides step-by-step strategies, a checklist for implementation, and key insights into what makes prebunking content more effective for audiences. If you're an organization, journalist, or content creator looking to thoughtfully engage in an increasingly complex and often unreliable online environment, take a look at this approach to countering misinformation online. Explore the full Prebunking Implementation Guide (English version) here: Explora la versión completa de la Guía de Implementación de Inoculación (versión en español) aquí:

2025 has brought with it the mainstreaming of misleading and deceptive narratives and practices to shape opinions and influence decision-making. Prebunking, a proactive approach that equips people with the tools to recognize falsehoods and manipulation before encountering it, has proven to be an effective strategy for building people's resilience to online harms. Drawing from DDIA’s 2024 research, including focus groups, polling, and experiments, the Prebunking Implementation Guide provides step-by-step strategies, a checklist for implementation, and key insights into what makes prebunking content more effective for audiences. If you're an organization, journalist, or content creator looking to thoughtfully engage in an increasingly complex and often unreliable online environment, take a look at this approach to countering misinformation online. Explore the full Prebunking Implementation Guide (English version) by downloading here: https://www.ddia.org/en/best-practices-for-prebunking-misinformation Prevention, not cure, may be a more effective way to combat misinformation.

As they start their careers, doctors swear to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. If people tackling misinformation were to establish an equivalent oath, we should make sure to borrow one of the original’s phrases: “Prevention is preferable to cure.” As with medicine, so with misinformation: It is better to prevent misinformation from spreading at all than to try to debunk it once it’s spread. Here’s why. Debunks don’t reach as many people as misinformation, and they don’t spread nearly as quickly. If they do reach us, they generally struggle to erase the misinformation from our debates or our brains.

Even when we’ve been told that the misinformation is false, research suggests it continues to influence our thinking. So it helps to take a page from medicine: Prevention, not cure, may be a more effective way to combat misinformation. Prebunking is a technique gaining prominence as a means to build preemptive resilience to misinformation. This guide was developed for practitioners interested in defending against misleading and manipulative information. It documents the foundations of prebunking, aiming to translate academic research into a practical how-to guide that enables groups and individuals with no prior knowledge of behavioral psychology to deploy their own prebunking interventions. This work is a collaborative effort between the University of Cambridge, Jigsaw (Google) and BBC Media Action.

The University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab has been at the forefront of developing prebunking approaches, based on inoculation theory, designed to build people’s resilience to mis- and disinformation. Jigsaw, a team at Google, has partnered with leading universities around the world, including the University of Cambridge, to test prebunking in a variety of settings in order to understand the advantages and limitations... BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international development charity, is adapting and testing the use of prebunking approaches as one of its strategies to tackle information disorder in the various countries where it works. This guide was written by the following people (listed in alphabetical order by organization): Mikey Biddlestone, Trisha Harjani, Sander van der Linden, and Jon Roozenbeek (University of Cambridge), Alasdair Stuart (BBC Media Action), Beth... Prebunking is a technique that shifts the focus from directly challenging falsehoods or telling people what they need to believe to understanding how people are manipulated and misled online to begin with. It is a growing field of research that aims to help people resist persuasion by misinformation.

Prebunking, or "attitudinal inoculation," is a way to teach people to spot and resist manipulative messages before they happen. The crux of the approach is rooted in taking a step backwards and nipping the problem in the bud by deepening our understanding of it, instead of designing redressal mechanisms to tackle it after... It has been proven effective in helping a wide range of people build resilience to misleading information. Prebunking is a psychological strategy for countering the effect of misinformation with the goal of assisting individuals in identifying and resisting deceptive content, hence increasing resilience against future misinformation. Online manipulation is a complex issue, and multiple approaches are needed to curb its worst effects. Prebunking provides an opportunity to get ahead of online manipulation, providing a layer of protection before individuals encounter malicious content.

Prebunking aids individuals in discerning and refuting misleading arguments, thus enabling them to resist a variety of online manipulations. Prebunking builds mental defenses for misinformation by providing warnings and counterarguments before people encounter malicious content. Inoculating people against false or misleading information is a powerful and effective method for building trust and understanding along with a personal capacity for discernment and fact-checking. Prebunking teaches people how to separate facts from myths by teaching them the importance of thinking in terms of ‘how you know what you know’ and consensus-building. Prebunking uses examples and case studies to explain the types and risks of misinformation so that individuals can apply these learnings to reject false claims and manipulation in the future as well. Prebunking helps individuals identify manipulative messages by providing them with the necessary tools and knowledge to recognize common techniques used to spread misinformation.

Successful prebunking strategies include; All these alert individuals to potential manipulation attempts. Prebunking also offers weakened examples of misinformation, allowing individuals to practice identifying deceptive content. It activates mental defenses, preparing individuals to resist persuasion attempts. Misinformation can exploit cognitive biases: people tend to put a lot of faith in things they’ve heard repeatedly - a fact that malicious actors manipulate by flooding the Internet with their claims to help... The ‘prebunking’ technique helps to create resilience against misinformation and protects our minds from the harmful effects of misinformation.

There are two primary approaches to combating misinformation: debunking and prebunking. Both approaches attempt to foster trust in verified information and mitigate the negative impact of false claims. However, as we’ll see, the two approaches have some significant differences. Debunking involves identifying, analyzing, and disproving misinformation. There are three key steps to debunking false or misleading claims. The first, identification, is as simple as specifying what information or claim is potentially false or misleading.

It’s not particularly helpful, for instance, to speak in broad terms (for example, “Paul is lying”). Identification helps ensure everyone is on the same page about what’s being discussed. The second, verification, involves analyzing the information or claim that was identified. This analysis involves questioning source (where is the information coming from?) and context (is the information actually related to the topic it claims to be?), as discussed in more detail in the “Verification and... Part of this analysis can also involve pinpointing potential sources of disinformation, such as fake accounts or bots (explained further in the “Bot Detection” chapter of this book). The last step, disproving misinformation, comes if the verification process has determined that the information or claim needs refutation.

This step involves specifically stating what part or parts of the information don’t align with facts, preferably by presenting evidence that refutes the claim.

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