The holiday season is coming up. You’re in the middle of planning who brings the turkey and who mashes the potatoes when a relative sends a video to the family group chat.
The caption is alarming enough without the lack of evidence, and you feel a surge of anger. Several members of your family have already replied with varying degrees of belief.
You think, “What’s wrong with you guys? How could you possibly believe this?”
I sincerely suggest thinking about it but not sending it.
When the people we care about become increasingly misinformed or fall victim to targeted disinformation, the fear beneath our frustration – and even anger — is understandable.
We worry about what decisions they will make based on what they believe and whether we are losing the ability to reach them. Often, they seem like entirely different people, and we are left bewildered, wondering how this could have happened.
Seeing people we love believe things that are untrue and even hateful is an incredibly difficult experience, no matter the context. In many cases, the person undergoes a radical personality change.
Who Is Trying to Mislead Whom?
When it comes to misinformation and disinformation, it is important to differentiate between the two. Misinformation is false or misleading information that is circulated. We may not intend to deceive anyone.
We have all accidentally spread misinformation, for example, sharing a piece of news we later learned wasn’t true or sharing an AI generated video we thought was real.
When we spread misinformation, we do not intend to misinform others. It is often a spur of the moment mistake we make while on social media that we make by not taking extra time to confirm that it is true. In the fast-paced world of minute-by-minute news, it’s easy to do.
On the other hand, disinformation is false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive. The intent is to deceive, create a strong emotional reaction, or get people confused or angry.
This distinction is not mere semantics as it sets apart the person or bot who creates a false story. These individuals have entirely different motives.
Your family member may share an alarming post that details a conspiracy because she wants to protect her children and feels she is responsibly informing her community. People also share things that make them feel knowledgeable or make sense of uncertainty.
Meanwhile, those producing and purposefully spreading disinformation may want money, power, or seek an audience they can manipulate. We can look at Russian psyops as a documented example of deception organized at scale. Russian troll farms are operations where paid workers use online accounts, often with invented identities, to manipulate public discussion.
A bipartisan 2019 U.S. Senate investigation found that Russia’s Internet Research Agency impersonated Americans and operated fake activist pages to influence voters and deepen divisions. Russians operate on Hegelian logic and strategically like to infiltrate and manipulate two sides of an issue.
Many of my readers might be surprised to know that people who are Democrats have been messaging Kremlin talking points. Understand the idea of “controlled opposition.” Many power brokers give money to candidates running for election from both parties — so if either wins they have someone they can influence.
Quite disturbingly, these troll farms even promoted an anti-Muslim protest and an opposing demonstration at the same Islamic center in Houston in May 2016. The two protest groups eventually confronted each other and escalated until both groups verbally attacked each other.
This is but one real example of how deliberate disinformation can become misinformation and actually convert into mobilized, dangerous events.
Creating a large amount of confusing and conflicting stories serves an additional purpose. If every other source of information seems dishonest, an unscrupulous leader or group can posture as the only person worth believing. This can also serve to create fear in a population.
After all, a scared nation craves certainty, and someone who boldly asserts that they have the facts can and will easily generate strong influence. Many false stories therefore begin as deliberate deception and travel through a network of sincere people.
The Importance of Curiosity
When we believe things that aren’t true, these beliefs can help us feel like one of the few people who understands what is happening.
Michael Shermer’s book Conspiracy (read my interview with him here) helps explain why fear and the search for patterns can make extraordinary explanations attractive.
If someone thinks a hidden threat endangers their family, they may reasonably experience your quick correction as quite dismissive. To someone with strong protective instincts who actually means well, this positions you as an adversary (as unfair and undeserved as it may feel). This is the first problem they face.
When we interact with someone with a false belief by ridiculing them or insulting them, we give them yet another problem to solve. Now, they feel they must both convince you of their truth which in their mind is protective and protect their dignity.
Curiosity helps you discover what the person actually believes and why it matters. It also gives them room to consider a correction without surrendering their self-respect.
How Can We Be Curious and Skeptical?
Consider a situation where your brother shares a short video claiming that a school has secretly adopted a frightening new policy. You suspect that the claim isn’t true and may be disinformation.
Right away, pause. Take a long deep breath. Exhale slowly and even longer to calm your nervous system. These interactions are not easy to deal with and can often produce a fight or flight response in people with a strong instinct to immediately correct the misinformation.
Before replying, notice your own reaction. If you are angry and feel worked up, this is not the time to have a discussion. Also, it’s usually best to have these conversations one on one rather than in front of a group of people where the person will feel cornered and instinctively feel that they need to protect their ego. These are also not conversations to have in lively, unstructured, and emotional debates around the dinner table. Choose a private moment when neither of you is rushed.
I like to invite people to start with questions and curiosity. You want them to share more about their beliefs so that you can understand them. You also want to genuinely take the mindset of “I am willing to change my mind. Maybe I was wrong.” Strange things happen every day – and maybe you were wrong. Find out more.
So, let us return to the situation. Your brother shares the alarming news about the school. It sounds like a common conspiracy you’ve heard, but you need to know more.
“What happened at the school, exactly? What worries you?”
He tells you that the school is hiding information from parents about the safety of their children, and the government is in on it.
Here, you want to reflect back his concern accurately.
“Worried parents are intentionally being kept in the dark?”
It is actually incredibly reasonable for him to be concerned about this. If it were true, it would alarm most anybody. For this reason, we want to steer clear of saying things that judge his character as it is a desirable trait for people to care about the safety of children. Instead, we want to ask about the evidence.
“Where did you hear this?”
He says that he saw a clip of a meeting of school board trustees online.
“What did it say?” you ask.
At this point, you want to carefully and calmly listen to the answer, asking one question at a time. A rapid series of questions can feel like a cross-examination (and a conversation rarely improves with one). If the discussion expands into ten other allegations, gently return to the first one, or what seems to be the most important one.
“Can I watch the video together with you?”
Now you have acknowledged his concern without endorsing the claim. You have also offered a way to investigate it. At this point, you may or may not be knowledgeable enough to gently offer an explanation for the content of the video.
It may be true, or it may not be, or it may be a combination of the two. Sometimes, videos are clipped to look worse or defamatory with the entire contents providing more context. If you aren’t sure about the video, thank him and tell him you’d like to look into it, because safety concerns you too.
What I want you to notice here is that firstly, we didn’t immediately shut down the interaction, become aggressive, or immediately declare the information false. Two, we didn’t tell the person we agreed with them or that we believed that the information was true.
After this, you may wish to do your own research into what you’ve been shown to find out for yourself. If it turns out that the information is false, at a later time you can kindly approach him again and show him what you’ve found.
“Can I show you something? I’m worried someone is spreading something untrue about what you told me about the schools.”
It’s a good idea to watch this video together too, rather than just sending it to them if you can. If they refuse and if it feels like the conversation is going okay, you can gently point out that you watched what they showed you, and you’d really appreciate it if they did the same.
Sometimes, the person is entirely unwilling to watch or will shut you down entirely. It is not a good idea at this point to continue to try and press them, as often, this will lead to a heated confrontation or personal attacks.
You may wish to ask them, “Is there anything I could show you that might shift your thinking?”
If the answer is “Nothing”, then it is not productive to try and continue that conversation.
If at any time voices rise, lower the temperature and pause.
“I want us to keep talking, but I’m getting frustrated. Let’s come back to this.”
Prebunking The Disinformation Virus
Prebunking, or addressing the potential for false information before it happens, can address a specific false claim you expect to circulate or teach people to recognize techniques used across many topics.
This technique draws on psychologist William J. McGuire’s original inoculation theory in which a warning and a small, manageable example of a misleading argument, followed by an explanation of its weakness, can help people resist later persuasion. The vaccine comparison describes the learning process in which we become “immune” to false information.
Sander van der Linden and Matthew Facciani and other colleagues have applied this approach to misinformation, including through games and short videos that teach people how manipulation works.
For everyday use, choose a calm moment and start with a warning about a recognizable tactic.
“You may see dramatic video clips that leave out what happened immediately before or afterward.”
Using a simple example and then explaining how the specific type of disinformation is used is a great way to do this. Imagine someone clipping:
“I strongly support closing the library temporarily, so we can get the safety issues taken care of for the next generation of children”
This clip could be clipped to make it seem like someone has just said “I strongly support closing the library.” The words are real but the apparent message is now manufactured.
This is a practical way to demonstrate how this type of disinformation is created without spreading unnecessary fear which can leave people in a paranoid state, afraid to believe anything.
A generalized “Watch out for lies” is quite frightening. Giving practical examples plus an explanation gives them something to do. Drawing on the vaccine comparison, we teach these with low-stakes examples or a small, “dose” of the virus.
Practical Debunking
In cases where misinformation has already arrived, a correction needs to do much more than announce that it is wrong.
False information can continue to impact us even after we acknowledge and accept a correction. This effect compounds the more we hear a specific piece of false information, which also explains why catchy political catchphrases like “Stop the Steal” can influence our thinking.
A useful debunking follows four steps,
State the fact
Briefly identify the false claim
Explain why the claim is misleading.
Restate the fact
We can return to our illustrative school video example from before. Suppose the full recording shows a proposal being discussed and rejected, while the edited clip makes it appear to have been adopted.
Step 1. You might say, “I investigated and the school in actuality did not adopt that proposal. The full meeting recording shows it was rejected.
Step 2. “The claim that it secretly became a policy isn’t true. It was proposed by someone present at the meeting and then was immediately rejected. The short clip stops before the rejection, and I was able to find the full video.”
Step 3. “Here is the full recording and the meeting minutes. The proposal was discussed, but it did not become school policy.”
Step 4. “So, what do you think? Is it likely that someone deliberately meant to trick people?”
The reason we want to put the true information at the beginning and end of our debunking is because of the primacy and recency bias – people often remember what they heard first and last in a message.
And due to the fact that the more often false information is repeated, the more it tends to be sticky in our brains. We want to avoid ever repeating false claims. Sometime we must use it once to simply identify that that is what we are referring to.
It is also important to use accessible language and enough detail to explain the error. It is a good idea to choose sources a loved one already trusts, provided they are available. If somebody is more liberal leaning, they are more likely to trust liberal sources. If someone is more conservative leaning, these sources are likely to appeal to them more. Sometimes, where the message comes from is just as important as the message itself.
It is also important to be honest about what you do not know. If you cannot verify a claim, say it is unverified, and apply that standard to stories supporting your own position, too (after all, we are not exempt from checking our favorites).
Finally, correcting a false belief does not lead to the backfire effect. A persistent misconception about corrections is that the so-called “backfire effect” increases belief in a false claim. Many studies have not found evidence for this, and any evidence that was found is fairly shaky or uncommon. We should not abandon fact checking because someone might resist it.
An irritated response does not, by itself, tell you whether the person’s factual belief changed, nor does accepting a correction necessarily change their broader attitudes or behavior.
Keep the Conversation Possible
Many times, it isn’t realistic to expect a rapid turnaround in beliefs, even when we follow the next practices for debunking – as gently, and as slowly as we may do it.
We can have productive conversations with people without demanding a confession of wrongdoing or attacking someone’s dignity. We have all shared misinformation accidentally and owe it to ourselves and others to correct it when we realize. These actions model the kind of behavior we want to see from others.
Finally, curiosity does not oblige you to endure abuse or spend every evening fact checking someone’s feed or expending massive amounts of emotional effort to have these hard conversations.
Sometimes, thanksgiving should just be thanksgiving. It is completely fine to decide that you won’t or can’t have these sorts of interactions with people who absolutely refuse to be reasonable with you, treat you unfairly, or will not give you back the patience that you show them.
I want everyone to have the freedom to examine their beliefs and change their minds while encouraging others to do the same. We support that freedom by offering trustworthy information and treating people as capable of reflection.
There's a fine line between "debunking" when maybe the person professing to understand the "truth" also is leading with his/her own mis/disinformation.
Mate Thnkyou so much for this .. Quite a few helpful tips/suggestions that I think will be helpful when tlking family members on certain topics
Legend !