Countering Misinformation in India through Prebunking

The spread of misinformation poses a substantial challenge, including in countries 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 influence 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 in Hindi and Malayalam (N2 = 4,272, N3 = 1,676), and a large-scale study on YouTube (N4 = 129,710). We find limited support for our main hypothesis, observing no consistent improvement in veracity discernment. In a series of focus group discussions (N5 = 33), we explore why this is the case. We find that, while the videos were considered highly entertaining and useful by the vast majority of viewers, the item rating tasks we administered to our participants were a poor method of efficacy assessment. We discuss and contextualize the methodological and practical complications of conducting intervention research in the Global South.