Researchers tested vaccines to prevent the spread of hoaxes

News24xx.com -  Researchers are looking for ways to prevent the spread of hoaxes. But are there ways to prevent false news that has already spread? 

Read the explanation.

For decades, medicine has given us an easy way to prevent disease: vaccines.
We are certainly familiar with how vaccines work, which include viruses that have been weakened into our bodies, to help us build antibodies against actual diseases.

Now vaccination has become a common practice in doctors around the world, and has stopped the spread of some of the worst diseases of the past century, including measles and polio.

But can vaccines be applied in the outside world?

Researchers are working on a kind of vaccination that can fight the specter of the 21st century: fake news.

This can be successful because misinformation has a viral nature. Fake news spreads faster, deeper, and further from the real story, flows from 'sufferers' to 'sufferers' through Twitter hashtags, WhatsApp groups and your grandfather's Facebook profile (yes, he has FB).

"Even if you try to give the right information, wrong information sticks to people," said Sander van der Linden, who heads the Social Decision Making Laboratory at Cambridge University. 

"After integrating into long-term memory, it becomes very difficult to fix it."