Subject: Prebunking
"First, warn people they may be manipulated. Second, expose them to a weakened form of the misinformation, just enough to intrigue but not persuade anyone. “The goal is to raise eyebrows (antibodies) without convincing (infecting),” Van der Linden and his colleague Jon Roozenbeek wrote recently in JAMA.

Inoculation, also called “prebunking,” is just one of several techniques researchers are testing to stop people from falling for misinformation and spreading it further. Others have focused on fact checking and debunking falsehoods, educating people about news sources’ trustworthiness, or reminding people periodically to consider that what they’re reading may be false. But Van der Linden has captured public imagination in a way few others have, perhaps because the concept is so seductively simple. “It’s definitely the one that has gotten most attention,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University.

Van der Linden’s 2023 book, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, has won many awards, and Google’s research arm, Jigsaw, has rolled out the approach to tens of millions of people via YouTube ads. “My reading of the literature is that it’s probably the most effective strategy,” says Jay van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University."

https://www.sciencemagazinedig... (probably gated)

(No word yet on antibiotic therapy for the already-infected: "This is Band-Aid stuff" the author says later in the reference)

-- sutton