🧵 What Priming Teaches Us About Disinformation—and What We’re Not Watching Closely Enough

Based on Shaki, Aumann & Kraus (2024)
arxiv.org/pdf/2412.1...

#PrimingPower4

Source:
Shaki, Aumann & Kraus (2024)
Voter Priming Campaigns: Strategies, Equilibria, and Algorithms
arxiv.org/pdf/2412.1...

#PrimingPower4 #Disinformation #ForumThreads #MediaLiteracy #AttentionPolitics

We usually define disinformation by what’s false.

But this model shows:

You don’t need to lie to shape an election.
You just need to change what people think matters most.

That’s priming—and it’s harder to detect than any fake.

#PrimingPower4

The bottom line:

What feels urgent isn’t always organic.

Sometimes it’s engineered.

We must build media literacy that includes not just truth vs falsehood, but signal vs spotlight.

That’s how we build democratic resilience.

#PrimingPower4

Ask yourself:

Who is deciding what today’s most important issue is?
Is that issue new—or newly amplified?
Who benefits if that becomes the central lens for this election?

This is how priming gets weaponized.

#PrimingPower4

4 – What This Means for Disinfo Defense

Priming doesn’t require lies.

It works by engineering urgency.

That’s why disinfo literacy must expand beyond truth vs falsehood—into who controls what feels important.

#PrimingPower4