Our initial brainstorming was motivated by a New York Times article, “The Horrifying Images Are Real. But They’re Not From the Israel-Gaza War,” by Angelo Fichera. This article focused on malinformation in the form of real videos and images getting purposefully miscontextualized (for the article, specifically around the topic of the Israel-Gaza war). This was an area of interest as it pertained strongly to participatory disinformation.

Research shows that people tend to be more morally lenient towards misinformation that is consistent with their already held beliefs (Joyner, Buchanan, & Yetkili, 2023). This “ends justify the means” narrative seemed to us a good target for prebunking strategies. Here, we don’t have to convince someone that they’re doing something they don’t believe they’re doing. This type of misinformation spreading is specifically conscious. If we can dissuade them from the internal logic that is motivating their behavior, we can effectively prevent the act.

However, the fact that conscious participation was involved also posed a challenge when constructing an ad. Pointing out that somebody shouldn’t be doing something they made a conscious decision to do inherently feels judgmental. Our goal in creating these ads has always been to avoid triggering psychological defense mechanisms that would make the intended audience become completely unreceptive to the ad.

There were two parts to our strategy to avoid this: firstly, the character that was explicitly calling attention to what the other had done (in terms of spreading disinformation) had to take a softer approach than most people likely would in a similar situation. We wanted to confine the language to identifying the act of spreading misinformation, while avoiding judgmental language. Secondly, consistent with our compassionate approach in previous ads, we wanted to acknowledge that the feelings behind someone’s decisions may be valid, even if the subsequent behavior is not.

We also wanted to continue avoiding specific and emotionally intense real-life political situations in the setting of the ad. A dog show seemed like an appropriate venue to allow for a relatively innocuous form of “us vs them” mentality that might drive participatory disinformation. It also allowed us to highlight that the feelings the character spreading disinformation has are based on a single experience that is then extrapolated into a faulty generalization.