Countering Misinformation in India through Prebunking

Misinformation poses a substantial societal challenge, including in the Global South. However, to date, the vast majority of research into understanding and countering misinformation has taken place in the Global North, and the practical, methodological, and financial complications of doing research with underrepresented groups in Global South countries pose substantial limitations. For this study, we developed five humorous, live-action “prebunking” videos starring a well-known influencer from India, each tackling a different manipulation technique often used on Indian social media: spoofing, decontextualization, the perfect solution fallacy, emotional manipulation, and scapegoating. We hypothesized that the videos would significantly improve people’s ability to correctly identify these techniques in news and social media content in an online pilot study (N1 = 547), two field studies (N2 = 4,272, N3 = 1,676), and a large-scale study on YouTube (N4 = 129,710). We find limited support for our main hypotheses, observing some significant but no consistent improvement in technique discernment. In a series of focus group discussions (N5 = 33) and an additional randomized controlled trial (N6 = 827), we explore why this is the case. We find that, while the videos were considered highly entertaining and useful by the majority of viewers, the item rating tasks we administered (evaluating a series of social media posts) were an unfamiliar method of efficacy assessment for our participants. We discuss how interventions can be best designed and measured in contexts where assumptions from the Global North may not apply.