Inside the University of NSW's nudge unit that wants to ‘prebunk' misinformation before it even reaches you

Sky News AU

05-05-2025

Today, much like confetti at a Pride parade, the term 'Orwellian' is thrown around with reckless abandon.
Due to misuse and overuse, it has lost much of its power.
But, sometimes, just sometimes, no other word will do.
This brings us to what is unfolding in Australia right now, which resembles something straight out of an Orwell fever dream.
What once sounded like the dystopian fiction of 1984 is now being quietly and efficiently implemented in Australia.
In partnership with the UK's infamous Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), originally dubbed the "Nudge Unit," the University of New South Wales has launched a new program to "prebunk" so-called misinformation before it ever reaches Australian citizens.
The stated goal is to train Australians, in no uncertain terms, to instinctively reject certain narratives before they've even heard them.
At first glance, it might sound clinical — harmless, even.
However, what it truly represents is something far more dangerous.
Essentially, what we are confronting amounts to a vast psychological operation against the public mind.
Initially a UK government think tank, BIT now collaborates closely with global NGOs, tech giants such as Meta, the United Nations (UN), and governments worldwide.
During the COVID pandemic, Western governments openly weaponised fear, deliberately amplifying public anxiety to drive compliance with lockdowns.
Psychologists later condemned these tactics as totalitarian, accusing officials of using fear, shame, and scapegoating not as public health tools, but as instruments of mass psychological control.
Now, those same manipulative techniques are being deployed once again, but in an even more nefarious manner.
In 2025, the goal has expanded exponentially: to pre-program citizens on issues like immigration, climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and election trust, conditioning a sort of reflexive rejection of unauthorised views before they even surface.
According to the program's official materials, emotionally persuasive messages, even those based on facts, are now being flagged as potentially dangerous if they stray from the specific, pre-approved narratives.
Carefully scripted 'motivational warnings", the authors suggest, should be used to inoculate people preemptively.
The aim isn't dialogue.
It isn't critical thinking.
It's behavioral programming, pure and simple.
Australians are not being informed.
They are being engineered.
The concept of "inoculating" audiences against future misinformation appears repeatedly throughout the document, echoing language disturbingly similar to the public manipulation strategies deployed during the pandemic.
Back then, "nudging" populations into compliance was a slippery, almost sadistic strategy, with subtle pressure being applied to steer behavior without citizens ever realizing it.
Now, the document suggests nudging can be taken even further.
Inoculation can be "passive," where audiences quietly absorb prepackaged talking points, or "active," where individuals are trained to hunt down and refute "misinformation" themselves, all while believing it was their own idea.
This shift toward gamified behavioral conditioning is portrayed as empowering.
But it's not.
If anything, it's incredibly sinister.
Training people, especially young audiences, to "spot" misinformation based on government-sanctioned templates effectively grooms them to internalize carefully crafted viewpoints while rejecting others without critical thought.
Gamification bypasses rational analysis by tying emotional rewards — such as pride, belonging, and victory — to the "correct" answers.
It doesn't teach objective analysis; instead, it teaches pattern recognition based on authority-approved cues.
Over time, it wires young minds to associate agreement with success and skepticism with failure.
In doing so, it quietly shifts the goal of education from seeking truth to maintaining loyalty.
What begins as a game ends as a form of invisible, unshakeable control.
The document's case study involving TikTok illustrates this danger with a sobering degree of clarity.
Back in 2022, UN Women Australia partnered with a TikTok quiz creator to embed a political message into what appeared to be harmless entertainment.
After several light-hearted trivia questions, users were suddenly confronted with a left-of-field political "fact" — that humans will live on the moon before global gender equality is achieved — followed by a direct call to action.
The structure is textbook inoculation: lower the audience's guard, embed an emotionally charged narrative, and prime them for a desired political response.
That this technique was deployed on TikTok, a platform infamous for shaping the opinions of millions of young users through algorithms, should alarm anyone concerned about independent thought.
Gamifying political messaging makes it more effective, more ominous in nature, and many times more difficult to recognise.
Worse still, the document praises this manipulation as a success, boasting millions of views and hundreds of thousands of "likes," as if mass levels of mind-molding were a neutral achievement rather than a profound ethical breach.
The language of inoculation obliterates the line between informing people and programming them.
If COVID taught us anything, it's this: once governments and institutions taste that kind of control, they rarely give it up willingly.
It's no longer enough for Australians to think for themselves on complex issues.
Under this model, they must be emotionally primed in advance to reject any view the state deems undesirable or inconvenient.
And what kind of views are we talking about?
Criticisms of refugee policy.
Doubts about election integrity.
Concerns over vaccines.
Questions regarding radical climate measures.
In other words, the very issues many of you care about are now being rebranded as threats to be neutralized, not debated.
Australia is not just another country experimenting with new methods of communication.
It is, I suggest, a laboratory for a model of dictatorial democracy, one where citizens are permitted to "vote" and "speak" but only after being properly trained about what ideas are acceptable.
During COVID, Australia revealed the extent of its measures: travel bans, curfews, public checkpoints, and quarantine camps.
And now, instead of physical restrictions, the government and its partners are quietly erecting psychological ones.
Instead of jailing protestors, they intend to prebunk them before they can even protest.
Instead of banning news stories, they intend to make citizens disinterested in hearing them.
Instead of police raids, they plan to condition emotional rejection.
What becomes of a society where individuals are no longer allowed to wrestle honestly with important issues, where doubt itself becomes suspect, where every unpopular question triggers an immediate reflex of fear, shame, and dismissal?
You don't need to imagine.
It's happening right now.
Orwell wrote fiction.
Australia is building reality.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.