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Anti-Fake News Vaccine

BETC HAVAS, Sao Paulo / GLOBO TV / 2023

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Overview

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Credits

OVERVIEW

Background

2018 elections in Brazil were directly influenced by Fake News and everything point that the same would happen in 2022 elections.

Committed to democratic values, O Globo, the biggest newspaper in the country, must do something to immunize the debate and slow down the Fake News machine to protect information and trust sources.

Idea

A country that 4 out of 10 people receive Fake News every day, is a country that we can assume that it is passing through a fake news epidemic.

And how to end the epidemic?

Applying a vaccine.

So, we developed the Fake News Vaccine: a snippet of code applied to newspapers pages that react to any attempt of fraud by immediately covering the altered content with a watermark that points it out as fake, preventing people from being misled.

The solution is simple, costless and can be applied in any site to identify and destroy fake news instantly, before they become a threat to our democracy.

The Fake News Vaccine was developed and distributed free of charge to all portals.

Strategy

We discovered that people with bad intentions were creating Fake News that looked like real news using an internet browser’s tool that allowed text edition on the newspaper’s sites with big credibility in Brazil.

Then, we developed and share for free a snippet of code that works like a vaccine for the website reacting to any attempt of fraud by immediately covering the altered content with a watermark that points it out as Fake News, preventing people from being misled by misinformation.

To make it big and relevant, we call the most important newspapers to talk about that, leading journalists to spread it, and celebrities shared it and showed how it works with their public.

Execution

We start it developing a snippet of code that can react to any attempt of fraud in websites texts.

With the code in hands, we share it for free on the internet for any newspapers portal or any person who wants to use it in their website’s main code, during the 2022 elections in Brazil.

In the same week that we launched it, big newspapers shared, high relevant journalists talked about it in their social media, influencers spread with their public and O Globo had the highest access rate in its history: more than 580 million secured pageviews.

Outcome

The reaction of Fake News Vaccine was fast: it was shared by the biggest main newspapers in Brazil, celebrities and leading journalists of the country shared it in their social media reaching millions of people, and we had more than 580 million secured page views in O Globo.

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