Google set to launch campaign to tackle misinformation about Ukrainian refugees amid war

A campaign to combat misinformation about Ukrainian refugees will be launched by Google's Jigsaw subsidiary, next week, according to media reports. According to New York Times, the campaign is based on the findings of two British universities' psychologists.

At the end of August, Jigsaw will launch a "pre-bunking" advertising campaign based on its investigation of the social media sites YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. According to the media agency, the campaign will target users in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Poland has taken in the greatest number of Ukrainian refugees. Slovakia and the Czech Republic have also been key destinations for escaping Ukrainians. The campaign aims to build resistance to false narratives about refugees.

New York Times reported, quoting Beth Goldberg, the Jigsaw head researcher as saying, "We are thinking of this as a pilot experiment, so there's absolutely no reason that this approach couldn't be scaled to other countries. Poland was chosen because it has the most Ukrainian refugees."

The study included seven experiments, including one with a group of Americans over the age of 18 who watch political news on YouTube. Jigsaw showed an inoculation video to approximately 5.4 million US YouTube viewers, with nearly a million watching for at least 30 seconds.

The campaign aims to build resilience to anti-refugee narratives

In collaboration with local non-governmental organisations, fact-checkers, academics, and disinformation experts, the campaign aims to build resilience to anti-refugee narratives. The spread of false and misleading information on social media networks in the United States and Europe has prompted various governments to call for new laws to combat disinformation campaigns.

Psychologists from Bristol and Cambridge universities created 90-second videos to "inoculate" viewers against misinformation. The article suggested the "inoculation theory" as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed. The article was published in the Science Advances journal.

Five quick videos were also created by researchers to protect viewers against five common forms of manipulation: "Emotionally manipulative language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and ad hominem attacks." The videos "improve manipulation technique recognition" and "increase people's ability to distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy content," according to the paper's authors.

(With agency inputs)

Image: AP/Unsplash