The company is expanding its anti-misinformation program in Europe
As the world’s biggest search engine by far, Google has a lot of power over which information can be accessed by the majority of the population. The company already has a lot of measures in place to prevent misinformation and to offer balanced search results and coverage, but there will always be some slipping through, and there are many other platforms and social dynamics out there that can also be culprits. That’s where Google’s ‘prebunking’ campaign comes in, which it has just expanded in Europe after finding success in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Google describes prebunking as a technique that doesn’t only fight specific bits of fake news but also gives the public tools to help them identify misinformation themselves and become more resilient against manipulation. In the aforementioned Eastern European countries, the company ran video campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, addressing issues like misinformation claiming a Polish housing crisis was unfolding because of Ukrainian refugees, which served unnamed actors as scapegoats to mask other issues in society. In short, the videos are supposed to make clear that there are rarely clear solutions to problems and that it’s usually not possible to blame anything on a single factor or group of people.
Google subsidiary Jigsaw based its campaign that first started in 2022 on findings it reached in collaboration with the universities of Cambridge and Bristol. Following the campaign, surveys found out that those who watched the videos were up to eight percent more likely to correctly identify misinformation attempts and fake news.
As for the expansion plans, Google’s Jigsaw wants to bring a similar localized campaign to Germany, where it will use the same social media and YouTube pre-roll advertising strategy. This will happen “in the coming months.” It’s likely that if it proves as successful as the precious campaign, we will see these kinds of campaigns in even more markets in the future.
The fight against misinformation might only become harder in the future. With Google and Microsoft both heavily investing in chat-based search and knowledge gathering, misinformation might inadvertently be presented in a more authoritative way, with chatbots like Google Bard appearing to share facts rather than reproducing false information or deliberate misinformation.
