Text taken from the Telegram channel of budni_manipulyatora
Original is here
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Experimental studies continue to confirm the effectiveness of information inoculation, also known as pre-debunking. They emphasize that typical methods, such as fact-checking and myth-debunking, have a limited impact on people's susceptibility to cognitive manipulation. Evidence has shown that various methods of pre-debunking misinformation are significantly more effective.
One online experiment compared the effectiveness of psychological inoculation with more traditional "false labeling" methods in protecting against misinformation on social media.
The study used real misinformation posts in a simulated social media environment and measured engagement. It found that both methods reduced engagement with the misinformation, but inoculation was more effective. It was concluded that the immunity provided by inoculation is robust to variations in individual cognitive processing of information, suggesting its overall effectiveness compared to false labeling.
Another study examined how psychological inoculation can reduce susceptibility to misinformation in large networks of rational agents, going beyond individual-level effects and considering dynamic online systems. Using an agent-based model, the study found that the effectiveness of inoculation is time-dependent. It highlighted the importance of pre-conditioning by influencing users' critical thresholds before their beliefs become entrenched and develop into closed "echo chambers." It also suggested that exploiting tipping point dynamics can lead to a herd immunity effect and that inoculation processes do not necessarily increase the rate of false positive rejections of credible information.
These results confirmed the robustness of inoculation in combating misinformation in online environments. Finally, one social experiment used five short videos to familiarize people with common manipulation techniques (emotional language, incoherence, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and personal attacks). Seven pre-registered studies, including a large-scale YouTube field experiment, found that these videos significantly improved the recognition of manipulation techniques, increased confidence, improved the ability to discern trustworthy content, and enhanced the effectiveness of information dissemination decisions.
The results demonstrated the intervention's reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in real-world settings, although limitations include the untested long-term effectiveness.
If translated into simple Russian - work on preemptive disinformation is more effective than reactive work on the tails, while the enemy prepares the next disinformation in streaming mode.