“If you think of information as a virus, instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold — that is, debunking — it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.” Welcome to pre-bunking.
On Wednesday (May 28), just over a week before the EU elections commence, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen unveiled her latest (and hopefully last) censorship initiative: pre-bunking. This approach, she says, is “more successful than debunking” and will allow society to “build up… immunity to misinformation.”
Von der Leyen drew heavily on the vernacular of virology and vaccinology to describe her pre-bunking initiative. This, of course, is ironic given her present embroilment in the “Pfizergate” vaccine procurement scandal, which is the subject of not one, but two, criminal investigations. It is also disconcerting to hear one of the most powerful political leaders of the so-called “liberal” West liken information to a virus. As I will show in this article, she is not the only one.
As with medicine, Von der Leyen says, prevention is preferable to cure: “If you think of information as a virus (NC: which, to be fair, most right-thinking people probably don’t), instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold — that is, debunking — it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.” That is where pre-bunking comes in.
Building “Immunity” Against Misinformation
Like vaccines, pre-bunking intentionally exposes people to a weaker dose of mis- or dis-information (as defined by the Commission, presumably), so that their minds can build up antibodies to resist real fake news stories later down the line. In the words of the concept’s creator, Sander van der Linden, “you preemptively try to refute falsehoods or the techniques that are used to dupe people online, so that people can build up cognitive or mental antibodies so that when they come across them in the future they are partly immune.”
Sander van der Linden is a Dutch professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge. His books include Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity and The Psychology of Misinformation. The titles speak for themselves.
Van der Linden’s lab is apparently partnered with the UK government, the US State Department, and CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), the notorious censorship agency embedded within the Department of Homeland Security. That’s according to Mike Benz, a former State Department official who is arguably the top expert on the US censorship industry. CISA has its own subsidiary: the Office of Biometric Identity Management. This gives an idea of how digital censorship will soon be tied up with biometric digital identity…
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Nick Corbishley 