Combating Disinformation Activity

Knowing how to spot disinformation is one thing. Knowing how to respond to it under pressure is another skill entirely, and this hands-on disinformation activity trains you to do both. In the same way that assembling an IKEA table also helps you understand how to take it apart, understanding how disinformation narratives are crafted will better help you refute them.

In this activity, you will practice debunking false information by first creating your own, and then developing methods to combat it. From there, this activity walks you through prebunking, the truth sandwich method, and narrative storytelling as three distinct ways to combat disinformation once you’ve seen how it’s built. Each approach can look different depending on the audience and the moment, but by the end of this activity you’ll have practiced all three on a narrative you created yourself, not just one handed to you.

Included are:

• A guided exercise for creating a disinformation narrative to understand how bad actors build false claims

• Instructions for writing fact-based, logic-based, and source-based prebunk statements

• A proven framework for debunking disinformation in real time

• Guidance on turning facts into a persuasive story that pushes back on false narratives

• Real examples showing each debunking method in action