Officials in Ann Arbor, Mich., Union County, N.C., and Contra Costa County, Calif., are posting infographics on social media urging people to "think critically" about what they see and share about voting and to seek out reliable election information.
Earlier this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency put out a public service announcement saying cyberattacks are not likely to disrupt voting.
Twitter will soon roll out prompts in users' timelines reminding them final results may not come on Election Day.
They're all examples of a strategy known as "prebunking" that's become an important pillar of how tech companies, nonprofits and government agencies respond to misleading and false claims about elections, public health and other hot-button issues.
The idea: show people the tactics and tropes of misleading information before they encounter it in the wild — so they're better equipped to recognize and resist it.
The strategy stems from a field of social psychology research called inoculation theory.
"The idea [is] that you can build mental armor or mental defenses against something that's coming in the future and trying to manipulate you, if you learn a little bit about it," said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, a division within Google that develops technology to counter online threats. "So it's a little bit like getting physically inoculated against a disease."...
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