Sander van der Linden — Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

280 published claims from this book.

• 75 to 85 percent of people are unaware of search result manipulation.
• A 2016 encounter with Aleksandr Kogan foreshadowed the Cambridge Analytica scandal
• A 25,000 dollar ad buy moved turnout in a targeted Texas subset
• A 5-to-1 reach advantage is needed to beat a micro-targeting rival
• A fluent statement is accepted without checking it for accuracy
• A loaded-rifle attack on a pizzeria was triggered by viral Pizzagate articles
• A majority of studies find YouTube’s recommender is a gateway to problematic content
• A misspelled fake celebrity account fooled thousands within minutes
• A Pakistani anti-kidnap PSA reframed as ‘evidence’ sparked fatal vigilante attacks.
• A private military contractor was running voter manipulation campaigns by 2005
• A quarter of Indian WhatsApp users are added to groups by strangers
• A single discredited study depressed US vaccination coverage for decades
• A small motivated minority can sway narrow-margin elections with disinformation
• A tiny minority of motivated users drives most extreme content consumption
• A twelve-year retraction delay let the misinformation spread unchecked.
• A Twitter rumour cascade propagates through user retweets of a claim.
• A US history teacher was fired for having students question the Holocaust
• A woman’s innocent temple visit was misread as child trafficking
• Across 6,000 subjects corrections reduce but never fully eliminate misinformation
• Active game inoculation sustains effects a week while passive infographic gains fade
• Active learning experiences strengthen resistance more than passive reading does
• Adding a photo raises the judged truth of any accompanying claim
• Airborne transmission makes measles vastly more infectious than Ebola.
• Algorithm-curated feeds amplify like-minded information sharing more than self-curated platforms
• Algorithmic content filtering can funnel users toward polarization and extremism
• Algorithmic exposure shapes the very choices that appear voluntary
• Algorithmic filtering amplifies preexisting biases rather than causing them
• Algorithmic-radicalization narratives may overstate causation since most frustrated users stay moderate
• An echo chamber requires both homophily and biased information diffusion
• An inoculation intervention must stay politically balanced to avoid preaching to converts
• Angry online responses to moral offenses drive content to go viral
• Apparent conspiracy correlations often dissolve once a third confounding factor is recognized
• Asch conformity findings are exaggerated in psychology textbooks
• Asch’s conformity findings were exaggerated in textbooks that omit the 95-percent dissent rate
• Automated recommendation feeds can expose teenagers to thousands of radicalizing videos
• Average US adult saw only about three fake news pages during the 2016 election
• Awareness of a correction does not stop misinformation from infecting related memories
• Backfire effects occur only among extreme believers in triggering contexts
• Backfire effects occur only under contextual triggers, not as a default state
• Bayes’ rule prescribes updating beliefs in proportion to incoming evidence
• Being inside an echo chamber raises one’s odds of encountering misinformation
• Belief in just two of three viral fake headlines predicted defection for 2016 voters
• Belief in misinformation ranges from automatic to deliberative along a continuum.
• Belief in some conspiracies predicts endorsement of unrelated fictional ones
• Believing false claims often reflects credible-source trust, not deliberate distortion
• Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign bombarded millions with fake news via WhatsApp groups
• Boredom and job loss can drive politically inactive people into radicalization
• Bots supplied nearly all negative sentiment in the Catalan referendum debate
• Brief exposure to conspiracy content reduces science acceptance and civic-mindedness
• Cambridge Analytica’s backers linked data misuse directly to far-right political campaigns
• Canonical psychology findings circulate with their critiques rarely taught
• Closed-group message provenance plus social pressure drives viral misinformation sharing
• Cognitive biases vary from common mild heuristics to rare deliberate distortions
• Communicating scientific consensus reduces climate polarization across the spectrum
• Competing psychological explanations of reasoning are often simultaneously valid
• Conspiracies involving over a thousand people mathematically fall apart quickly
• Conspiracy belief rates may be stable while their reach has exploded
• Conspiracy believers abandon specific claims while retaining a core that something must be wrong
• Conspiracy theories assume nefarious intent and are never positive
• Conspiracy theories satisfy epistemic, existential, and social needs
• Conspiracy theories stay viable by anchoring to real events people care about
• Conspiracy theories succeed only when anchored in issues people care about
• Conspiracy theorists on Twitter express more anger and swearing than science communicators
• Conspiracy theorists online express more anger and out-group talk than science popularizers.
• Conspiracy theorists reinterpret absence of proof and challenges as confirming evidence
• Correct prior knowledge does not shield people from the illusory truth effect
• Correcting misinformation may be ineffective because people continue using it
• Corrections work best when paired with a credible alternative explanation
• Courts saw a century ago that juries cannot disregard inadmissible evidence
• Creators hijack recommendation algorithms to expose radicalized users to rebuttals
• Cross-cutting exposure fails because outgroup posts are predominantly derogatory
• Cross-partisan exposure backfires because the outgroup posts encountered are mostly derogatory
• Decades after Nazi propaganda ended, one in five Germans still endorsed anti-Jewish views
• Deceptive signaling is evolutionarily widespread across the animal kingdom
• Deliberation among like-minded peers pushes groups to more extreme positions.
• Denser associative memory networks yield stronger resistance to misinformation
• Digital footprints removed the survey barrier to identifying persuadable voters
• Digital-native teenagers are as vulnerable to misinformation as adults
• Directionally motivated reasoning makes people reject disconfirming evidence and seek explanations for it.
• Disagreement over evidence can stem from accuracy motives or identity motives
• Discussing inoculation afterwards strengthens acquired immunity
• Doctored videos can be shallowfakes, simple out-of-context cuts reused as misinformation
• Doctored-video fears can cause real violence when victims match the false profile
• During the Brexit campaign, most Twitter users only engaged fellow partisans, not opponents.
• Each added moral–emotional word boosts post sharing by up to 20 percent
• Echo chambers amplify beliefs by sealing people off from counter-content
• Echo chambers may be a lesser problem than a larger unstated social-media dynamic
• Echo chambers often form offline rather than through filter bubbles
• Echo-chamber clustering is much stronger on Facebook and Twitter than Reddit
• Education lowers fake-news belief but not susceptibility to illusory truth
• Effective debunking frames corrections around the truth, not the repeated myth
• End-to-end encrypted platforms strip sender metadata, erasing misinformation origins
• End-to-end encryption removes any ability to trace misinformation sources.
• Epidemiological models can study the spread of misinformation online.
• Even a logically airtight Wager can serve as post-hoc rationalization of prior belief
• Even committed purveyors of false claims eventually yield to evidence
• Even misinformation experts fall for convincing fake news footage
• Even the filter bubble’s own proponent concedes its effects proved smaller than expected
• Every major health authority found no autism-vaccination link and none replicated Wakefield’s results.
• Everyone is cognitively susceptible to misinformation, not just outliers
• Experience makes people learn resistance more reliably than explanation does
• Explicit social coercion embedded in messages overrides accuracy motivations.
• Explicitly retracted misinformation still leaks into memory representations and answers
• Exposing people to diverse views fails because social media rewards outrage
• Exposing people to opposing viewpoints increases rather than reduces polarization
• Exposure to one narrative type makes groups drift apart and grow more extreme collectively
• Exposure to weakened misinformation builds psychological immunity against it
• Fabricated audio and text warnings about child abductors drove the panic
• Facebook exposure diversity depends primarily on friendship-network structure
• Facebook published its own Science study minimizing algorithm-driven echo chambers
• Facebook’s friend-data scraping multiplied a small consented sample into millions of profiles
• Facebook’s newsfeed ranking tailors content exposure to each user’s predicted engagement
• Facebook’s own research measured ideological alignment by averaging sharers’ self-reported politics
• Fact-check warnings fail to stop repeated fake headlines gaining perceived truth
• Facts shift constantly while manipulative techniques stay stable across millennia
• Factual corrections rarely backfire even on ideologically charged issues
• Fake news blurred the line between official and media definers
• Fake news exposure in 2016 probably could not swing election results
• Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet
• Fake news sharing in 2016 concentrated among elderly white male right-wing Facebook users
• False beliefs often stem from bad sources rather than closed minds
• False news reached more people than truth on Twitter, driven by human sharing.
• Filter bubbles personalize content invisibly unlike self-chosen echo chambers
• Fixing misinformation requires changing revenue incentives, not just content exposure
• Framing a civil war as foreign defense can legitimize aggression
• Friend scraping expanded 270,000 paid participants into data on 87 million people
• Google has personalized search results for every user since 2009
• Greater scientific literacy widens political polarization on contested science rather than narrowing it
• Herd immunity means only a large-enough majority needs inoculation against misinformation
• Higher education amplifies science rejection among politically conservative Americans
• Highly anticipated events make even experts vulnerable to sophisticated fakes
• Human memory stores concepts as associative networks of linked nodes
• Human personality is measured on continuous spectrums, not sorted into fixed types
• Human vision is probabilistic inference, not faithful recording of light
• Humans, not bots, drive the faster spread of false political news
• Ideologically aligned false news is remembered far more by partisans
• Images make factual claims more fluently processable and believable
• Individual choice shapes news exposure more than algorithmic filtering does
• Information warfare can succeed by inducing generic confusion rather than by persuading anyone.
• Inoculation can spread socially like herd immunity against misinformation
• Inoculation can target faulty reasoning tactics rather than specific facts
• Inoculation can work therapeutically after exposure, not only preventively.
• Inoculation protects even climate sceptics from believing new misinformation.
• Inoculation theory aims to prevent false beliefs before exposure rather than correct them after
• Knowing a false claim was retracted fails to lower Americans’ belief in it
• Mass voter profiling was framed as a modern form of military psychological operations
• McGuire’s ‘no prior exposure’ requirement crippled inoculation research for decades.
• Media false balance gave a discredited vaccine claim lasting public credibility
• Memory limits stem from slow encoding speed, not storage capacity
• Messaging platforms amplify misinformation but are not its root cause
• Microtargeted disinformation outranks echo chambers as a manipulation threat
• Middle-schoolers judge news credibility by whether it includes a picture
• Misinformation becomes disinformation only when intent to deceive is added
• Misinformation hijacks cognitive machinery and resists correction like a virus
• Misinformation leaves residual traces in memory even after correction
• Misinformation often wins because it is simpler and more repeated than truth
• Misinformation shaped beliefs or actions in half of Capitol riot cases
• Misinformation spread online can be modeled as an epidemic using the SIR model
• Misinformation spreads like a virus with no physical contact required
• Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda differ mainly by intent to deceive
• Moral outrage online substitutes for confronting offenders in person
• Most 2016 election fake news stories favored Trump over Clinton by a wide margin
• Most people do not actively seek out polarizing content when browsing freely
• Most people show no awareness of having their search results manipulated
• Multi-platform exposure could mean daily fake news contact for average voters
• Nazi propaganda blamed Jews for starting the war as a defensive pretext
• News consumed via social media correlates with more polarization than direct browsing
• Numerically accurate polling can still be rated severely misleading when framing distorts context
• Octavian’s exposure of Antony’s alleged will was likely a forged propaganda weapon
• One WhatsApp user could reach 2.5 million people within seconds via group forwarding.
• Online radicalization recruits people by speaking persuasively to their personal anxieties
• Only four percent of people can reliably identify fake news headlines
• Ordinary citizens have committed arson over a debunked 5G conspiracy theory
• Ordinary people can generate conspiracy theories on demand
• Ordinary, otherwise unremarkable people can become radicalized through online research
• Out-of-power party supporters endorse more conspiracy theories, especially far-right ones
• Outrageous trial-balloon positions let the right shift debate ground without debating facts
• Outright fabrication represents only a small fraction of misleading media
• Over half of Americans now endorse at least one conspiracy theory.
• Partisan false memories of real events follow ideological bias
• Pascal’s Wager treats belief in God as a rational expected-value gamble
• Payments attracted the 270,000 quiz takers whose data seeded the dataset
• People deploy selective perception and motivated reasoning routinely when faced with evidence
• People keep discredited beliefs when corrections leave no replacement explanation
• People often distort evidence to fit preexisting worldviews rather than updating beliefs
• People often resist or reverse belief updating rather than tracking evidence
• People preferentially form false memories consistent with their political allegiances
• Perceived scientific consensus is a central gateway to related climate beliefs.
• Personal proximity to an affliction can motivate endorsing fringe causal claims
• Personality traits are heritable and predict misinformation sharing habits
• Plandemic video damaged public support for vaccination
• Platform incentive structure suppresses accuracy motives and amplifies identity motives
• Platform reward structures incentivize negative and divisive content over constructive content
• Playing at producing misinformation did not turn players into producers
• Polarization arises from social media access, not from people’s own content choices
• Polarization is both cause and consequence of echo chambers over time
• Political identity can override direct visual perception of crowd sizes
• Politicization of anti-misinformation efforts blocks evidence-based campaign adoption
• Politicizing science defeats even well-designed interventions meant to boost accuracy.
• Pre-exposing people to weakened persuasive attacks cultivates mental resistance against later misinformation.
• Presenting disconfirming evidence to partisans strengthens rather than weakens their views
• Presenting scientific consensus reduces rather than triggers partisan backfire
• Probability rules assume events are independent of each other
• Propagandists intuited the illusory truth effect long before psychologists verified it.
• Psychographic models behind political microtargeting were not very accurate
• Psychological antigens can induce mental resistance to fake news
• Psychological inoculation can build societal resistance to misinformation
• Psychological inoculation decays without periodic recall-based boosters
• Psychological manipulation targets cognitive biases as its weak point
• Quitting social media for a month causally reduces political polarization
• Radicalization stories overstate the causal role of recommendation algorithms
• Randomized trials show pausing social media reduces political polarization
• Refuted conspiracy theories persist for decades after being debunked
• Repeated absurd propaganda can still drive voters to elect its authors.
• Repeated exposure makes false claims feel true in the gut
• Repeated exposure makes people find sharing misinformation less unethical
• Repeating a statement increases belief in its truth regardless of accuracy
• Replication attempts have largely failed to reproduce Kahan’s most extreme cultural cognition claims
• Reputation messaging fails where preemptive mental defences are absent.
• Researchers tracked 900 users’ viewing to match YouTube recommendations with actual choices
• Retractions fail partly because the brain engages model-updating less when corrections challenge prior beliefs
• Retroactive exposure to misleading content fabricates detailed memories of impossible events
• Roman imperial couriers took weeks to deliver messages that now transmit instantly
• Satire can out-produce real conspiracy theories using the same formula
• Scarcity and stress deplete mental bandwidth for future-oriented thinking
• Science denial often targets the policy prescriptions, not the science itself.
• Scientists doubt fake news directly changes voter choices
• Search bias still swung real Indian election votes by 8 to 11 percent.
• Seed participants’ Facebook friends expanded 270,000 people into 70 million profiles
• Self-reported fake news exposure greatly exceeds model-based estimates
• Self-reported fake news exposure is mostly false memory rather than real contact
• Seven traits of conspiratorial thinking are encoded in the CONSPIRE acronym
• Social belonging can outweigh the motivation for accuracy
• Social media amplifies rather than causes pre-existing biases in susceptible users
• Social media amplifies timeless misinformation tactics rather than inventing them
• Social media changed misinformation’s speed, reach, and social context
• Social media did not invent propaganda but reshaped information flow along three axes.
• Social media diffused far faster than any earlier major technology
• Social media engagement peaks for content near the boundary of what platforms allow
• Social media’s novelty is the speed, reach, and medium of disinformation, not its existence
• Social network structure, not algorithmic ranking, decides crosscutting exposure
• Some claims remain unbelievable no matter how often repeated
• Speakers widely reject evidence and double down on false claims publicly
• Specific claims are subordinate to a superordinate conspiracy narrative
• Stress drives the brain toward cognitively cheaper confirmation bias
• Strong affective polarization across groups erodes democratic discourse
• Sustained misinformation immunity requires periodic booster reminders
• The brain actively generates what it expects to see, not what is actually there
• The ease of processing a statement influences how true it seems
• The economists’ estimate that fake news was rare depends on sampling and memory assumptions
• The Facebook study’s assumption that choices are independent of algorithm exposure is shaky
• The higher a virus’s R0, the harder it is to control in a population.
• The Kanizsa triangle shows perception can run on inference without any real object
• The misinformation debate splits between tribal-motivated and accuracy-driven accounts of reasoning
• The MIT study analyzed 126,000 fact-checked news rumours shared by 3 million users.
• The MMR-autism study was fraudulent, with recruited patients and fabricated diagnoses.
• The phrase fake news is ascribed to whichever outlet is politically opposed
• The predictive brain fills in visual gaps based on expectation.
• The same observable behavior can stem from opposite motivations
• Time pressure makes everyone rely on intuition and mistake fluency for truth
• Tiny persuasion effects remain profitable when scaled across millions
• Top-down processing shapes perception of contested facts as well as vision.
• Twitter prebunked election fraud myths to all 73 million US users in 2020
• Undermining facts in democracy needs only a few highly active super-spreaders, not a majority
• Unpersonalized studies underestimate how strongly the algorithm pushes conspiratorial content
• Urgency, group pressure, and inattention predict fake-news sharing
• Urgent threatening messages, group pressure, and shallow assessment drive fake-news sharing.
• Viral fake news in 2016 favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton
• Viral WhatsApp rumors triggered fatal mob lynchings across India
• Visual perception of a photo crowd can be distorted by political bias
• Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet paper linked MMR vaccine to autism
• Wartime-region adults retained anti-Semitic views that education and economics could not erase
• Weakened fictional doses stimulate resistance without actually duping players
• Weekly IRA Twitter retweet surges measurably moved Trump’s polling numbers
• WhatsApp misinformation was getting people killed in India
• WhatsApp rumors may merely license violence people already want to commit
• Whether social media dupes people or merely amplifies their existing prejudices is unresolved.
• YouTube can curb misinformation when it chooses to prioritize doing so
• YouTube’s recommender drives up to 70 percent of content watched.
• YouTube’s recommender still steers viewers toward same-category harmful videos despite algorithm changes