Prebunking for Democracy: Experimental Evidence on Modes of Misinformation Resilience Training

In an age in which information is abundant but verification is scarce, democratic resilience increasingly depends on citizens’ ability to evaluate online content critically. Strengthening this capacity requires interventions that build misinformation resilience - to be aware, to recognise, to assess, to resist, and to counter false or misleading information online - without constraining free expression. This study examines how digital literacy training affects citizens’ capacity to identify false social media content and their willingness to share it, and how these effects vary across delivery modes. The intervention is designed and delivered by a UK civil society organisation specialising in media literacy. We implement a two-stage randomised experiment. First, participants are randomly assigned to one of three delivery modes: an in-person workshop, an interactive live webinar, or a passive video (short or long format). Second, within each mode, participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control, yielding seven experimental arms: four live arms (in-person treatment, in-person control, webinar treatment, webinar control) and three passive-video arms (short-video treatment, long-video treatment, and a shared control that views the short video after outcomes are collected). All formats cover comparable core content but differ in interactivity, cost, and scalability. This design provides causal evidence on which training formats most effectively - and feasibly - strengthen citizens’ misinformation resilience. We measure this construct across four dimensions: awareness of misinformation risks, accuracy in discerning false content, resistance to sharing misinformation, and confidence in helping others verify information. We use the term misinformation as an umbrella category encompassing both unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation, recognizing that users typically encounter false content without knowing the intent behind it.