How to fight ‘fake news’ (Warning: It isn’t easy)

No, the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not being discontinued. No, Earth will not be plunged into darkness for 15 days. And, no, Katy Perry did not broker peace with the Islamic State.

Those are a few of the falsehoods spread online that are in need of debunking in this age of “fake news,” when misinformation seems to appear from nothing and reaches hurricane-force speeds in an instant.

Researchers have spent decades trying to understand how such misinformation spreads and, now, a review of their work offers new guidance for the journalists, fact-checkers and others working to find, and defend, the truth.

In a report published in Psychological Science, a team of academics reviewed two decades of research to better understand how to effectively debunk misinformation. In the end, they found eight worthwhile studies, with more than 6,800 participants.

Based on the findings of those experiments, the authors offer these broad recommendations for how to expose misinformation.

Limit arguments supporting misinformation

If you have to repeat a lie, it’s best to limit the description of it, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, one of the study’s authors, who is also the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.

The problem, she and the other authors said, is that rehashing arguments in favor of misinformation can inadvertently reinforce it, strengthening the defense against the truth.

That’s especially true when the lie offers a simpler explanation than the truth, as with the discredited argument linking the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella to the onset of autism.

“The best way to displace that would be to say, ‘Here’s a causal explanation for autism, and it isn’t that,’ but science doesn’t know the causal explanation for autism yet,” Jamieson said.

With no alternative to replace it, the discredited theory proves remarkably resilient. And repeating the arguments in the theory’s favor only make it stickier, she said.

Encourage scrutiny

When debunking information, it’s also useful to get the audience in a skeptical mindset, the authors argue.

Take the widely refuted “birther” theory — promoted for years by President Donald Trump — which suggests that President Barack Obama, was not, in fact, born in the United States. Just labeling the theory “false” is not as convincing to people who believe it as walking them through the reasons it can’t be true, Jamieson said.

It’s also helpful to make the audience feel engaged with the skepticism, said Dolores Albarracín, an author of the paper and a professor of psychology, business and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“You lead them down the garden path rather than do all the work for them,” she said.

Present new information

Giving your audience new and credible information is especially effective in thoroughly unseating misinformation, the authors found.

That, they said, supports their hypothesis that the new information allows people to update their understanding of events, justifying why they fell for the falsehood in the first place.

Video may work better than text

In a study published this summer in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jamieson and three other authors found that videos could be especially useful in correcting misinformation. The fact-checking videos seemed to “increase attention and reduce confusion” compared with text, one of the authors said in a statement at the time.

STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES Donald Trump, then the president-elect, and President Barack Obama in the Oval Office of the White House. For years, Trump promoted the false claim that Obama was not born in the United States. Now, new research offers guidance on how to fight fake news.