The questions started when the US approved the Pfizer vaccine two months ago and have been increasing ahead of the Australian rollout — now only weeks away.

Things like: How did they get the vaccine ready to go so quickly? How do we know it's safe? Which one would you get?

"We spend time discussing things like that and try to reassure people," he says.

Australians are overwhelmingly supportive of vaccinations in general, but surveys show a higher than usual rate of hesitancy about the COVID jab.

This is to be expected — COVID vaccines have been developed very fast, so it's natural to ask how they have been found safe to use.

But lurking in the background, experts say, is a hidden campaign of misinformation.

Their concern is that as the vaccines start to roll out, social media posts peddling fake news about unreported deaths, hidden microchips or some other conspiracy theory will increase in volume. Other countries have seen this already.

Dr Stoupas has noticed how a vaccine hoax will circulate online, and then, the very next day, one of his patients will bring it up during their consultation.

"A lot more people are looking for information themselves online and unfortunately there's a lot of misinformation online," he says.

What's to be done?

Social media companies have proven unable to keep up with the spread of misinformation on their platforms, while studies show that debunking and fact-checking services are often not as widely read as the misinformation itself.

Rumours travel faster and deeper than the truth online. Reiterating misinformation in order to debunk can even make the problem worse.

If we think of misinformation as an infectious disease, the attempts to both stop the spread and treat the symptoms have not proven to be effective enough.

What if there was another way? What if we could vaccinate against misinformation?

Prevention is better than the cure

First proposed in the 1960s, "inoculation theory" has (by sheer coincidence) gained prominence during the pandemic and the rollout of actual vaccines.

A series of trials over the past decade have shown that exposing people in advance to the tricks of misinformation (equivalent to giving them a weakened version of a virus) makes them better at recognising misinformation later.

The studies also show inoculation is more effective at preventing misinformation than debunking or trying to change people's minds.

In essence, prevention is better than the cure.

"Once people accept conspiracies it's very difficult to dislodge," says Dr Tom Aechtner, a leading expert on vaccine hesitancy and misinformation at the University of Queensland.

"It's much more effective to inoculate before it becomes part of consciousness."

His colleague, Professor Matthew Hornsey, describes it as "like stealing thunder".

"When you see a trick or technique being used, you can think, 'Oh yes, so that's what they're trying to do' and you're less likely to be manipulated."

All misinformation, the theory says, uses a common bag of tricks.

Big Tobacco used these tricks to convince millions of people for decades that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, Professor Hornsey says. Tricks like discrediting their opponents or using fake medical experts to promote smoking.

"They've since been used by vested interests trying to convince the public that the science isn't settled on climate change," Professor Hornsey says.

"Now we're seeing it with anti-vaxxers."

What are these tricks?

In 2018, two psychologists at the University of Cambridge developed an online game to demonstrate the tricks of misinformation and test inoculation theory.

In Bad News, players take on the role of an aspiring fake news tycoon: their task is to get as many followers as possible by actively spreading fake news.

Along the way, players collect badges for each trick of misinformation:

Polarisation — amplifying existing grievances and tensions between different groups

Invoking emotions — such as fear, anger, or empathy

Spreading conspiracy theories — creating or amplifying alternative explanations for news events which assume that these events are controlled by a small, usually malicious, secret elite group of people

Trolling people online —deliberately inciting a reaction from a target audience by using bait

Discrediting others — typically to deflect blame and accusations of bias

Impersonating more credible sources — such as setting up a fake Twitter account

Though developed for research, the game received positive reviews from gaming sites and has been played more than a million times.

In a study of 15,000 players, published in the journal Palgrave Communications, the researchers tested the participants' ability to discern fake news before and after playing the game.

"And what we found is that people systematically improve in their ability to recognise fake news," says Sander van der Linden, a professor of psychology at Cambridge and one of the authors of the study.

"They rate fake news as being less reliable, less accurate and more manipulative.

"They also become more confident in their ability to discern credible from uncredible content."

The results were promising enough that the UK government and the World Health Organization commissioned a follow-up version of the game, Go Viral!, that focuses on COVID-19 misinformation.

"It's been out for a few months now and we've had hundreds of thousands of people play it, which isn't too bad," Professor van der Linden says.

"We've been able to entertain and hopefully also inoculate people."

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Play Online At | getbadnews.com/#intro

Story By | Technology reporter James Purtill

Story By | James Purtill