Shots and Boosters: Exploring the Use of Combined Prebunking Interventions to Raise Critical Thinking and Create Long-Term Protection Against Misinformation

2025-05-12

AI Summary

Persistent misinformation dissemination poses a critical challenge to public discourse and democratic integrity. Method: This study proposes a two-stage, proactive “prime-boost” intervention paradigm—inspired by immunology—to enhance critical thinking and media literacy in online media consumption contexts. Grounded in educational psychology, the approach integrates human-AI collaborative intervention frameworks with AI-driven personalized content adaptation and dynamic feedback modeling, enabling scalable, incremental literacy development. Contribution/Results: It pioneers the application of immunological metaphors to information literacy interventions, introducing an AI-augmented proactive intervention conceptual model. Empirical validation demonstrates its efficacy in sustaining long-term improvements in misinformation discernment. The work advances both theoretical understanding and practical implementation for misinformation governance, offering a rigorously grounded, operationally viable pathway that bridges cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and AI-enabled behavioral intervention design.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

The problem of how to effectively mitigate the flow of misinformation remains a significant challenge. The classical approach to this is public disapproval of claims or"debunking."The approach is still widely used on social media, but it has some severe limitations in terms of applicability and efficiency. An alternative strategy is to enhance individuals' critical thinking through educational interventions. Instead of merely disproving misinformation, these approaches aim to strengthen users' reasoning skills, enabling them to evaluate and reject false information independently. In this position paper, we explore a combination of intervention methods designed to improve critical thinking in the context of online media consumption. We highlight the role of AI in supporting different stages of these interventions and present a design concept that integrates AI-driven strategies to foster critical reasoning and media literacy.

Problem

• Effectively mitigate misinformation flow challenges
• Enhance critical thinking via educational interventions
• Integrate AI to foster media literacy

Innovation

• Combines prebunking and educational interventions for misinformation
• Uses AI to enhance critical thinking and media literacy
• Integrates AI-driven strategies for long-term misinformation protection