The campaign against disinformation will be aimed at users in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other countries. It was noted that the informative materials will be aimed at countering the narratives spread by Russian propagandists against refugees.

The organizers say it will work as a pilot project for now, but has a chance to expand to other countries. Poland was chosen because it was the country that accepted the most Ukrainian refugees.

What research is the campaign based on?

Psychologists from Cambridge and Bristol universities have created 90-second videos that aim to “vaccinate” people from misinformation. Such a method is expected to help reduce people’s susceptibility to misinformation, by letting people know exactly how misinformation can happen.

The researchers created five short videos that they believe raise people’s awareness of the five manipulation techniques:

• emotional manipulative language,
• inconsistency
• false dilemmas,
• goat searched,
• transition to personality.

The authors of the article concluded that the videos “improved the recognition of manipulation techniques” and “increased people’s ability to distinguish reliable content from untrustworthy content.”