Google Expanding ‘Prebunking’ Campaign to Germany

A woman passes the logo from the web search engine provider Google during the digital society festival 're:publica,' at the Arena Berlin in Berlin on June 9, 2022. (Annegret Hilse/Reuters)

Google is planning to expand its “prebunking” campaign to Germany after operational success in Eastern Europe, with the campaign aimed at countering the effects of “disinformation,” even as some experts warn that prebunking would effectively act as censorship.

Prebunking is a “scientifically researched communication technique that helps users to recognize and reject future attempts to manipulate them with false information. This helps to increase society’s resilience to disinformation and related narratives and manipulation techniques,” according to an article posted by Google on Feb. 13.

Prebunking campaigns often use short videos that explore commonly used “disinformation” techniques such as scaremongering, the company stated. The videos explain certain concepts according to Google’s progressive ideological alignment, like a precautionary education.

Jigsaw, an incubator division within Google that studies emerging social challenges, made “successful use” of prebunking campaigns in Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic in 2022, the company has said.

Germany will be the second place globally where Jigsaw will be launching a “corresponding campaign.”

However, some people have questioned the use of prebunking, pointing out that the tactic can end up creating biases in the minds of viewers.

“Everybody needs to understand the game. We can’t directly target our own citizens tearing down threadbare official statecraft narratives. So destroying our own citizens sharing skepticism, doubt and information becomes ‘Prebunking non-state malinformation,'” Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, wrote in a Feb. 10 tweet.

“Pre-bunking=Preemptive reputational destruction. Non-state=Individuals and Organizations including citizens and non-profits. Malinformation=True things that contradict and cast doubt on gated official narratives.”

Promoting Prebunking

According to Google, prebunking videos in Eastern Europe targeted “misleading anti-immigrant narratives” and were viewed more than 38 million times. The campaigns were run on major social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

After watching one of these videos, the proportion of viewers who “correctly identified” so-called disinformation tactics as explained via the videos rose by 8 percentage points.

In Germany, Google intends to use prebunking against manipulation techniques and narratives that are “widespread in this country.” That includes “conscious decontextualization,” such as taking photos or videos out of context to create “false narratives.”

The German campaign will start in the first half of this year.

An August 2022 study by Google and researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Western Australia tested prebunking strategies among 30,000 participants. The studies were aimed at “inoculating people against manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation.”

Among the “misinformation” cited in the study is COVID-19 material that was linked to “reduced willingness to get vaccinated against the disease and lower intentions to comply with public health measures.”

Videos used in the tests were found to improve “manipulation technique recognition” while also raising people’s ability to “discern trustworthy from untrustworthy content.”

“The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types,” lead author Dr. Jon Roozenbeek from Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab said in a statement.

Google and Online Manipulation

Prebunking isn’t the only tool Google has in its arsenal to manipulate the concept of right and wrong over the internet.

In an interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads“ program in January, Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies revealed that the company was curating data it was feeding artificial intelligence to create an AI that adheres to certain narratives such as social justice and leftist values.

“If you want to create an AI that’s got social justice values ... you’re going to only feed it information that confirms that bias. So by biasing the information, you can bias the AI,” Vorhies said.

In a January speech, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) called out the dangers posed by Big Tech, naming Google as the “greatest threat to speech in the market.”

He warned that Google has the power to influence U.S. elections, stating that the search engine had allegedly altered front-page results in favor of Democrat candidates.

Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.