In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at how to be protected against conspiracy theories, making drugs in space, what’s next for a Nobel Prize winner and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here.
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Yesterday, my colleague Emily Baker-White reported that Facebook is running hundreds of ads with false election news. It’s not the only social media platform spreading misinformation. CNN reported that election officials in battleground states are being overwhelmed with falsehoods being spread on Twitter/X and last week NBC reported that false election claims amplified by site owner Elon Musk are viewed about 200 times more often than tweets that fact-check them.
Social media platforms are drowning in misinformation, and not just about the election. Generative AI platforms make things worse as they hallucinate wrong answers, get used for making deepfakes and accelerate the production of AI slop (which Wired reports now comprises something like half the new posts on blogging platform Medium).
A new article in Science this week offers up one possible solution to the problem of misinformation: inoculation. Psychology researchers have been working on tools that can serve to “vaccinate” people against misinformation and conspiracy theories. The two-part approach combines first highlighting the possibility of misinformation and then exposing them to less compelling versions of false stories. The idea is to build up a layer of skeptical immunity that makes people less susceptible to the manipulative tools that........