The race to inoculate the country

Part two of two. What the research says is the most effective way to fight back against the disinformation afflicting our friends, family, and neighbors.

Earlier this week I wrote about conservative provocateur and Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer standing in a Kyiv bomb shelter, telling the Associated Press that Russian propaganda had bamboozeled her. Loomer’s acknowledgment confirmed what many of us already intuited: Putin’s Russia was hiding in plain sight within many conservative media outlets. And the concreate proof came in the form of a federal indictment that finally showed some of us how it got there — $9.7 million of Kremlin money, one Tennessee company, two thousand videos, and six American commentators who say they had no idea.

I ended on a sour note: the government watchtowers that we rely on to scan for this are unmanned.

So what do we actually do?

Before I answer that, I want to be straighter with you than most people writing about this are willing to be. The evidence here is contested. A fair amount of it says “less than you’d hope.” And I’d rather you hear the weaknesses in my own argument from me than from someone who’s arguing with me.

So let’s start with the strongest case against my position.

In 2024, a group of political scientists — Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, and Andy Guess, among others — published a review in Nature arguing that exposure to flatly false content online is rarer than most of us assume, and heavily concentrated in a small group of people who were already out at the far end of things. Their argument is that the engine here is demand, not supply, and that the real damage gets done by domestic elites with microphones.

In other words, most of the consequential false things Americans believe were said out loud, on camera, by other Americans.

Now for the good news, which corrects something you’ve probably heard secondhand. You may have heard of the “backfire effect” — the idea that correcting somebody makes them dig in and believe the wrong thing even harder. Yet, two political scientists, Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter, went looking for it across 52 different issues with more than ten thousand people and couldn’t produce it.

So correct the record — because It does move people. And while it rarely erases a belief outright, it can soften people to eventually accept the truth.

Get There First

The idea comes from immunology, which is why researchers call it “inoculation”.

A vaccine works by showing your immune system a weakened version of a threat, so that when the real one arrives, your body already knows the shape of it. Prebuttal does the same thing to counter lies. You show people the con in advance, in a small and harmless dose, so that when somebody runs it on them for real, something in the back of the mind goes: wait, I’ve seen this before.

There are two ways to do it. You can inoculate against a specific claim — here’s what they’re going to tell you about the voting machines in October, and here’s why it’s wrong. That works, but it only protects against the one claim, and there are always more claims.

Or you can inoculate against the technique, which is the version I’d put money on.

It might look something like “Here’s what a manufactured outrage clip looks like, and here’s how you can tell somebody edited it” or “Here’s how a fake local news site gets built — the county name in the URL, the stock photo masthead, the three real stories on top of one fabricated one” or “Here’s what it looks like when a stranger halfway around the world is working to make you feel like your neighbor is your enemy.”

When people understand a pattern, you don’t have to be able to predict the exact lie that may be told.

Messenger > Message

The messenger often matters more than the message. In a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tested vaccine messaging on Republicans. When the endorsement of vaccines came from a Republican elected official, intent to get vaccinated moved up about seven points. The identical message from a Democrat produced backlash — it pushed people the wrong direction.

Same words. Opposite result. The only variable was whose mouth they came out of.

And yet every instinct in American politics rigrht now is to send the most credentialed person available to go explain things to people who have no use for credentials. It doesn’t work — and perhaps it never did. The person who can reach a skeptical conservative on election integrity is a conservative — and preferably one that person might run into at church, or at work, or in a social setting.

Where Trust Still Lives

This is why Bright America is putting its efforts into local communities.

I’m sure you’re aware that the supply of local news in many places across the country is collapsing. But in the Reuters Institute’s survey work, local and regional outlets still post the highest trust of any category of news — year after year, across the map.

Local news is trusted — but it’s disappearing.

We’re partnering with local newsrooms to make prebuttal content in the form people actually consume: short and native to the platform; hosted by a real person with a name and a face, put where the audience already is.

We’re not waiting on national media to carry this. I hold no grudge against it, and I’d much rather it were healthy than sick. But the numbers say plainly that it can’t reach the people who most need reaching. An 8 percent trust rating is hardly a promising distribution channel.

The rest of us are going to have to get more literate about our own heads, too. And I mean that without the sneer that usually attaches to “do your research.” What you scroll changes what you think. The people you find most trustworthy were selected for you by a recommendation engine that has no opinion about whether they’re right. And there are foreign governments spending massive amounts of money on a bet that they can use that against you.

Say It Before November

I want to end where I started, because that’s the hopeful part.

It is not an easy thing to admit you’ve been fooled. And that’s because, all too often, it can feel internally and externally like saying “I’m a fool.”

That’s why I’m proud of the conservatives who have moved off Russia’s anti-Ukraine talking points. It’s not just Laura Loomer, but members of Congress, veterans, writers, local officials (and on and on) who took a fresh look at where the arguments came from and had the nerve to say in public that they’d been played. We should be gracious when people are willing to change course — and not just because it’s the kind thing to do, but because these people become the most compelling messengers to the rest of the public who may have been fooled also.

And now I’d like to see a lot more of this, but on a much more challenging subject given the President’s sensitivities…

We need conservatives to speak up about election denialism, and we need them to do it before the claims arrive — not in the wreckage afterward. That’s the whole idea of prebuttal. It means being willing to say now, in August, what we’re all going to be told in November: that the counts are slow because the law requires it, that a lead changing overnight is the system working exactly the way it was built to work, and that your county clerk is not a criminal.

And yes, it means being willing to prebut the President. He is still the single most powerful voice in conservative politics. I expect that to change, because nobody’s influence is permanent and second terms end. When it recedes, something will fill the space. What fills it is being decided right now, by whoever bothers to do the work of building a network.

Our best assets are sitting in places Washington doesn’t spend much time thinking about. The business owner, he sheriff, the county commissioner, the pastor, the woman who’s run the Chamber of Commerce for twenty years and knows everybody’s kids by name. These are people with standing in an actual place — and standing is about the only currency left that still buys anything.

Building that network is the work — not a theory of a network. An actual list of actual people, in specific counties, prepared and willing to speak before the fire starts.

Laura Loomer had to stand in a bomb shelter in Kyiv to see what had been done to her. Most people are never going to get that.

What they’ll get is whatever we manage to put in front of them first.

So let’s be first.