Washington, DC – Today, the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) released comprehensive best practices on how to most effectively inoculate U.S. Latino communities against misinformation. Inoculation, or “prebunking,” is a promising technique in combating misinformation. This approach builds resistance against falsehoods by exposing people to weakened forms of false or misleading narratives, or by exposing and explaining to audiences the techniques bad actors might use to manipulate us online.
“Our new research lays out key best practices for practitioners looking to prebunk misinformation targeting Latinos in an effective way,” said Roberta Braga, Founder & Executive Director of DDIA. “While all inoculation approaches we tested had some positive effects, having culturally competent content was more effective. These new findings show how essential it is that counter-misinformation strategies be adapted to really address our communities’ online needs.”
To understand how prebunking can be best harnessed for Latino communities in the U.S., DDIA conducted the first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial (RCT) with U.S. Latino communities that tested approaches to inoculation against the manipulative techniques of emotional language, ad-hominem attacks, and false dichotomies.
This experiment measured the prebunking videos’ impact on:
Participants’ ability to identify manipulative techniques used in misleading content
Participants’ willingness to share manipulative content
Participants’ abilities to detect whether manipulative content was trustworthy or not
DDIA also worked with a YouTube media company to produce explainers that prebunked the false narratives of election fraud and non-citizens voting.
Read the guidebook HERE.
Access the tactics-focused inoculation videos DDIA produced with MediaPlus and Cabezahueca Films, and with Factchequeado.
Check out the Spanish-language videos prebunking election fraud and non-citizens voting claims DDIA produced in partnership with Latina content creator Sylvia Salazar and Lunario.