Google Planning to Take Misinformation Monitoring to New Level with Behavioral “Interventions” and Pre-bunking

(by Didi Rankovich | Reclaim The Net) – Google has presented its project dubbed “Info Interventions” based on what it says is a behavioral science that, if these “interventions” are used as directed, could “teach” users to the degree they will become resilient to online harms.

Another promise is that by “pre-bunking misinformation” users can be “immunized.”

How is this supposed to work? Google has put up a site that states the goal is to provide accuracy prompts that would refocus users’ attention toward whatever Google decides qualifies as accurate information.

And to reach it, the “hypothesis” currently seems to be that “reminding individuals to think about accuracy when they might be about to engage with false information can boost users’ pre-existing accuracy goals.”

This method of effectively training users to behave in a desired way is unsurprisingly attempting to draw from behavioral science research and Google says it has been validated by digital experiments.

This “gift to the world” comes thanks to Google’s unit called Jigsaw, set up to “explore threats to open societies, and build technology that inspires scalable solutions.”

A Medium post by Jigsaw posted back in March 2021 declares that research suggests there could be a powerful way to reduce “misinformation” simply by reminding internet users to think about accuracy – in other words, goading them until they move to where you want them to go. Read Full Article >