Google to run ads educating users about ‘fake news’
Google plans to show ads that educate people about disinformation techniques, following a successful experiment by Cambridge University.
Google Jigsaw, which tackles online security dangers, will run adverts on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook.
Researchers found the videos improved people’s ability to recognise manipulative content.
They will be shown in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland to combat fake news about Ukrainian refugees.
Google said the “exciting” findings showed how social media can actively pre-empt the spread of disinformation.
The research was founded on a developing area of study called “prebunking”, which investigates how disinformation can be debunked by showing people how it works – before they are exposed to it.
In the experiment, the ads were shown to 5.4 million people, 22,000 of whom were surveyed afterwards.
After watching the explanatory videos, researchers found:
- an improvement in respondents’ ability to spot disinformation techniques
- an increased ability to discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content
- an improved ability to decide whether or not to share content
The peer-reviewed research was conducted in conjunction with Google, which owns YouTube, and will be published in the journal Science Advances.
Beth Goldberg, head of research and development for Google Jigsaw, called the findings “exciting”.
“They demonstrate that we can scale prebunking far and wide, using ads as a vehicle,” she said.
‘Common tropes’
Jon Roozenbeek, the lead author on the paper, told the BBC the research is about “reducing the probability someone is persuaded by misinformation”.
“Obviously you can’t predict every single example of misinformation that’s going to go viral,” he said. “But what you can do is find common patterns and tropes. The idea behind this study was – if we find a couple of these tropes, is it possible to make people more resilient against them, even in content they’ve never seen before?”
The scientists initially tested the videos with members of the public under controlled-conditions in a lab, before showing them to millions of users on YouTube, as part of a broader field study.
The anti-misinformation campaign and prebunking campaign was run on YouTube “as it would look in the real world”, Mr Roozenbeek said.
“We ran them as YouTube ads – just like an ad about shaving cream or whatever… before your video plays,” he explained.
How the study worked
Advertisers can use a feature on YouTube called Brand Lift, which tells them if, and how, an advert has raised awareness of their product.
The researchers used this same feature to assess people’s ability to spot the manipulation techniques they had been exposed to.
Instead of a question about brand awareness, people were shown a headline and asked to read it. They were told the headline contained manipulation and asked to identify what kind of technique was being used.
In addition, there was a separate control group who were not shown any videos, but were shown the headline and corresponding questions.
“What you hope to see is that the group that saw the videos is correct in their identification significantly more often than the control group – and that turned out to be the case,” Mr Roozenbeek said.
“On average, the group that got the videos was correct about five percent more often than the control group. That’s highly significant. That doesn’t sound like a lot – but it’s also true that the control group isn’t always wrong. They also get a number of questions correct. That improvement, even in the noisy environment of YouTube, basically shows that you can improve people’s ability to recognise these disinformation techniques – simply by showing them an ad.”
‘Evidence-based solutions’
Cambridge University said this was the first real-world field study of ‘inoculation theory’ on a social media platform.
Professor Sander van der Linden, who co-authored the study, said the research results were sufficient to take the concept of inoculation forward and scale it up, to potentially reach “hundreds of millions” of social media users.
“Clearly it’s important for kids to learn how to do lateral reading and check the veracity of sources,” he said, “but we also need solutions that can be scaled on social media and interface with their algorithms.”
He acknowledged the scepticism around technology firms using this type of research, and the broader scepticism around industry-academia collaborations.
“But, at the end of the day, we have to face reality, in that social media companies control much of the flow of information online. So in order to protect people, we have come up with independent, evidence-based solutions that social media companies can actually implement on their platforms.”
“To me, leaving social media companies to their own devices is not going to generate the type of solutions that empower people to discern misinformation that spreads on their platforms.”
See more here: bbc.co.uk
Editor’s note: Who decides what is the truth and what is disinformation? I looked up who funds Google, and found the following:
Google’s biggest investors are the big investment companies Vanguard Group, Blackrock Inc, T. Rowe Price Associates Inc and FMR LLC. The Vanguard Group owns 8.5 percent of T. Rowe Price, and Blackrock owns 5.9 percent of it.
FMR LLC (trading as Fidelity Institutional Asset Management) top funders according to fintel are Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), and UnitedHealth Group Inc.
UnitedHealth Group Inc’s biggest investor is the Vanguard Group, who own 8.6 percent of it.
Vanguard and Blackrock strongly promote the ‘climate emergency’ and are supporters of the political left in the US. This manifests itself through Google and Youtube (owned by Google) by the deplatforming, smearing and censorship of climate skeptics, and more recently of those skeptical of government polemic on the Covid ‘pandemic’.
What this means is Google have decided they alone will determine what is truth and what is ‘disinformation’, and their ‘truth’ is only government narratives. Anything that differs from that they consider ‘disinformation’.
Does this mean Google is biased in any way? Shirley not.
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cn
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The main stream media NEVER EVER TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING . They alter , delete , edit , omit and add wording to fit their narratives 100% of the time and have been doing that for decades .
A small example of main stream media sources below , all listed names are guilty of it and can NEVER be trusted.
Cnn, Msnbc, Abc, Cbs, Nbc, HuffPost, NYT, WashPost, The AP, BuzzFeed, Politico, NewsWeek, The Hill, Rolling Stone, Twitter , Sky News, Mediate, The Atlantic, USA Today, Time magazine, LA Times, Politifact, Reuters, Facebook , BBC, Wikipedia, Boston Globe, Vox, The Miami Herald, Mother Jones, Instagram, Factcheck .or, HLN , Yahoo, MSN, NY Daily News, Vice, Univision, People magazine, PBS, NPR, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Daily Beast, Bloomberg, Aurn, National Journal, BI ,
It’s very very very difficult to find factual information these days since all search engines only link to propaganda sources .
Try searching for political info on Google and other main stream search engines for instance , the ONLY links they will show you are from the above sources . Twitter and Facebook will also ONLY link to the above sources .
99.9% of all factcheckers are liberal owned and funded as well and their sole purpose is to confirm the lies that the above sources report . It fools a lot of people because they truly believe factcheckers are legit factcheckers but nothing could be further from the truth .
By far the best way to know with 100% certainty what’s factual info is to seek out what the above listed sources insist is disinformation because what they claim is disinformation and not trustworthy is ALWAYS 100% trustworthy .
What the above sources promote as real news IS NEVER EVER real news .
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cn
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Media Crimes Exposed – How news media are always lying to humanity
Leaked footage and whistleblower confessions reveal how the criminal media, corrupt scientists and wicked governments strategically plan to deceive the public. A must see for the entire world…
GOOGLE PROGRAMS HUMANITY
“The strategy of Google is to program humanity”, says Google senior software developer Zach Vorhies. “They want to sculpt the information landscape, and only show information that fits their agenda.” “Google has dozens of blacklists with tens of thousands of websites which they are hiding from the world”. Zach Vorhies worked with Google for eight years and was shocked about their manipulation program. He revealed 950 pages of Google documents to the Department of Justice. He also went to Project Veritas to expose the full truth.
https://stopworldcontrol.com/media/
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Anapat
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George Orwell had it all right, but he could not imagine that it would be us being so stupid to buy these devices that would stake our lives.
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Carbon Bigfoot
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READ THIS IT WILL OPEN YOUR EYES:
https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%A9-Censorship/dp/1510767363
By Zach Vorhies & Kent Heckenlively, JD
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