Pre-bunking: can you be ‘brainwashed’ into spotting fake news?

Name: Pre-bunking.

Age: A modern malaise/cure, still in its early infancy.

Appearance: What appearance? What are you talking about? It doesn’t exist. We were never here.

I’m sorry, what are you talking about? A thing that has a name but no face.

That’s helpful. It exists because the truth no longer does.

I’m going to need more. It is a lie in the service of veracity. A shadow with more substance than a solid fact. A whisper on the wind and iron in the soul.

Get on with it. It’s a way of teaching people how to construct fake news so that they are inoculated against the real thing when they see it.

By “the real thing”, you mean real fake news? Yes. Cambridge University is recruiting thousands of players to participate in an online game in which you pretend to be a fake-news tycoon and have to smear opponents, troll others, propagate conspiracy theories and marshal armies of bots to further your own machiavellian ends.

And what happens when they do? They become president. No, not really – little bit of politics there! Players – the hope is – become aware of how nefarious people and systems operate and are better able to spot and resist their machinations in this vale of tears we call life.

It sounds like a good idea in theory, with no chance of working in practice. That’s what elite universities specialise in. But it’s based on work done with US soldiers before the Vietnam war.

How so? After the Korean war, some unfortunate US PoWs were found to have been brainwashed by their captors into staying with them willingly. So, come the next conflict, GIs were “vaccinated” against this potential outcome by being deliberately steeped in a belief of American righteousness and love of liberty.

They were brainwashed against being brainwashed? You’re overthinking this a little bit.

I don’t think I am. I think you are.

Who’s to say who’s right? I am.

You are what? I’m to say. And I’m right.

Oh, OK. That’s my good little soldier.

Do say: Anything you like, as long as it’s with confidence and embedded in a carefully constructed web of self-supporting, spurious evidence.

Don’t say: Anything externally disprovable.