Fakery and falsehood: why prevention is better than cure

It’s possible to immunize people against false or manipulated information through simple exercises that policymakers and platforms could easily roll out, writes Sander van der Linden

In September 2024, the city of Springfield, Ohio, found itself in the spotlight. During a presidential election debate, Donald Trump repeated an outlandish claim: Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating the community’s domestic cats and dogs. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country,” Trump announced on live television. The story soon went viral on social media, making its way around the globe and garnering tens of millions of comments, memes, and AI-generated images of panicked pets from users on both sides of America’s political divide. Meanwhile, city officials in Springfield scrambled to debunk the claim, confirming that they had not received any such report. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby went further, decrying right-wing media for…

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I by IMD (Digital) - 1 Issue, 17. March 2025

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