Fake News Witch Hunts & Conspiracy Theories: An Infodemiologist’s Guide To The Truth by Pauline W. Hoffmann

Author:Pauline W. Hoffmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781737517887
Publisher: Broad Book Group, LLC
Published: 2024-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

How Do We Inoculate Ourselves Against Disinformation?

AS I JUST DISCUSSED, disinformation is sexy, or can be. How do we dress up the truth so it’s just as sexy? It’s difficult. I am creative, but even I have a difficult time with this.

I was invited to share information about disinformation in the class of a colleague recently. I mentioned that a common conspiracy theory is the existence of aliens and government cover-up. I also noted that the US government declassifying documents regarding this doesn’t help other conspiracy theories because people may say, “See! This conspiracy may be real. Others may also be real!” My colleague then chimed in with, “I’ve seen a UFO.” The entire class stopped listening to me and started peppering him with questions about it. When someone then asked how we should respond to disinformation, I noted how difficult it can be. They proved my point because once we heard someone may have seen a UFO, it was all over for my talk about disinformation. As communicators, we need to be as sexy as UFOs.

How do I share the truth here, being just as “sexy?” What is the truth? Remember the story I told in Chapter 2 about the professor? What if I categorized that as, “Humanities professor uses his sense of humor to get his class to think.” That’s not nearly as sexy as, “Humanities professor calls students ‘disease vectors’ and gets fired.” Also remember that we don’t want to take something out of context, nor do we want a rush to judgment to cloud our thinking. It can be difficult when we know that the salacious is what gets noticed, talked about, and shared. Can we give truth the same treatment to encourage an interest in it?

In this chapter I will discuss how to craft messages to combat disinformation and engage your audience with the truth.

BEWARE OF FEAR MESSAGING

I’ve been thinking about fear messaging in relation to disinformation quite a bit lately. Fear messaging is certainly not new. We’ve seen fear campaigns throughout history. Historic witch hunts come to mind (see more on this in the next chapter).

Fear messaging is any message in any medium (radio, TV, social media, print, etc.) that elicits a fear reaction in the recipient. It’s designed to do that. It wants you to be so afraid that you take the proscribed action in the message. For example, “Covid-19 is deadly and if you don’t get the vaccine you will die.”

That’s terrifying. Yes, we all know we will die—that’s life. But we would rather it happen later than sooner and perhaps not by a horrific virus. That said, is there truth to the fear message? Yes. It is quite possible that if you contract Covid-19 and you are not vaccinated, you will die. You may not, but the odds are likely against you.

We often see fear messaging in health-related contexts, but health is hardly the only thing to make us fearful. Elections are coming up in the US (and in many other countries) so we see all kinds of fear messaging in political campaigns.

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