To fight QAnon conspiracies, let's do PSAs

The darkness is cold and perception's gone wrong

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“Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

“Take a bite out of crime.”

“This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

I don’t know about you, but these have been burned into my brain. Seared by watching countless hours of television, perhaps no other commercials have had the lasting impact of these public service announcements. I haven’t started a forest fire; I haven’t committed crime; I haven’t done the kind of drugs that scramble my brain, only the ones that enhance it? Whatever, marijuana should be legal across the country. Anyway. Where was I? 

TV ads work because of a couple converging factors. 

First, repetition. You watch the same commercial no matter what channel you’re on, no matter which cable provider you have, no matter which device (OTT or linear), over and over again. 

Second, commercials are by definition dynamic, using sight/sound/motion to persuade, at best, leave a lasting impression, at worst. Even if you don’t buy into the message, your recall of the ad is much stronger than that of a display ad. 

A 2017 Neustar study (commissioned by Turner and Horizon Media, so take that what you will) found:

TV advertising consistently outperformed other options over the seven-year period examined from 2010-2016 with up to 7 times the relative lift over paid search, and 5 times better than display advertising. Dollar for dollar, TV provides the most scale and delivers the highest return on ad spend from both a sales and awareness perspective.

PSAs “work” when they’re narrative-based, tapping into something advertisers have known for a long time: storytelling builds empathy in the listener, which can change people’s minds. In a 2019 study about PSAs raising awareness for domestic violence, researchers found:

that empathy-laden narratives were indeed superior to nonnarratives in generating more favorable attitudes toward public service announcements and motivating bystanders to report abuse. The positive effect of narrative public service announcements was amplified when participants' issue involvement was high. More important, the results confirmed a serial multiple-mediator model of empathy and bystander efficacy for the effects of narratives on positive reporting intention.

In a 2010 study of the effectiveness of a PSA about epilepsy, researches found:

Of the 803 randomly selected Grade 5 (9-11 years) students, 406 (51%) had seen the epilepsy PSA. Those who saw the PSA scored significantly higher on knowledge (P < 0.001) and had more positive attitudes (P < 0.001) about epilepsy. Those who saw the PSA had even greater knowledge about epilepsy 1 month later, even though the PSA was no longer being televised. Having viewed, the PSA continued to be associated with higher knowledge and more positive attitudes independent of the effects of a school-based epilepsy education program.

The point is this: PSAs, for a whole slew of reasons, can work to get people thinking about a topic and can even change their minds. (Here’s a great history of PSAs)

So here’s my idea: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon join forces with the Ad Council to create PSAs that run on their platforms, on TV, on SVOD, AVOD, OTT, on news sites, on billboards—everywhere— about the harmfulness of the QAnon conspiracy. 

The oxygen of the platforms’ algorithms continue to fuel the spread of the conspiracy. No matter how much factual information from years of reporting is put into the public record, QAnon has moved from the margins right onto the page. Here are a few reports over just the last week:

CNN reports from Sunday:

Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger has a message about the QAnon conspiracy theory: It is a fabrication that must be denounced by political leaders in his own party.

Kinzinger, who represents the 16th district of Illinois, is pairing that message with one that's equally important: "If you know someone who buys into these theories, don't hate them." Instead, he said, have respectful conversations that are rooted in reality.

The backdrop here is that Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who won the GOP congressional primary runoff in Georgia, is a QAnon supporter. Kinzinger is pushing up against an ocean, trying to get GOP leadership to denounce the QAnon conspiracy. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that:

Groups espousing conspiracy theories associated with the group QAnon have exploded in popularity on Facebook Inc. FB +1.06% and its Instagram unit since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a new analysis finds, a sign that the far-right network is gaining traction on mainstream social media.

In an analysis of Facebook data conducted by social-media research firm Storyful, the average membership in 10 large public QAnon Facebook groups swelled by nearly 600% from March through July, to about 40,000 from about 6,000. The average follower count of some of the largest public Instagram accounts promoting the group’s ideology more than quadrupled in the same period, the analysis found.

And last Monday, NBC News reported:

An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to internal company documents reviewed by NBC News.

The investigation’s preliminary results, which were provided to NBC News by a Facebook employee, shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on Facebook, a scale previously undisclosed by Facebook and unreported by the news media, because most of the groups are private.

The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. It is not clear how much overlap there is among the groups.

So the reporting is there, across the largest and most influential news outlets. Now it’s time to throw in advertising. The drumbeat of reporting can be accentuated by the omnipresence of advertising. 

And the platforms themselves could lead the way. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube each, to varying degrees, started to monitor and regulate QAnon content. But that’s just playing Whack-A-Mole. We need an information campaign to go along with the spread of misinformation. 

The Verge reported last week that Facebook is putting out a tool to help blunt the spread of misinformation about COVID-19:

Facebook’s latest attempt to help combat the spread of potentially harmful COVID-19 misinformation involves a new notification screen that will provide more context about an article or other link, like when it was first shared and its source.

What prevents them from doing the same for all the QAnon content and groups?

At a time when Americans are inundated with propaganda from all sides—beyond QAnon conspiracies, we are on the receiving end of a never-ending misinformation campaign from the Trump administration—why not fight fire with fire?

(One of the more pernicious misinformation campaigns these days is the current mail-in voting messaging coming from the White House. Today, NBC News is running a PSA across its networks and platforms, according to Adweek:

that will help viewers determine when and how they can vote in the 2020 election, by detailing each state’s Covid-19 restrictions, mail-in ballot information, early voting and other key information.

Flood the airwaves, digital and linear; drop the PSAs into your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok feeds. Have the PSAs as preroll on YouTube videos. Make it so we can’t escape the message that QAnon is a harmful, baseless conspiracy.

What do we have to lose?

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Jay Z, “Public Service Announcement” (Live)

Some interesting links:

• Diageo to buy Ryan Reynolds' Aviation Gin, Davos Brands in $610 million deal (Reuters)

• What we’ve stolen from our kids (The Atlantic)

• A Private Security Company Is Detaining Migrant Children at Hotels (New York Times)

• The most revealing moments on cable news happen when one big-name host hands off to another (Washington Post)

• The 10 Scariest Election Scenarios, Ranked (Slate)

• Google Warns Australians Of Losing Free Search, Disrupting YouTube And Affecting Worldwide Services (MediaPost)

• As a Communications Medium, Email Ranks Low and Sows Doubt (Wall Street Journal)