PHOTO PREVIOUS PAGE ELENA FEDORINA/ADOBE STOCK; LETTERING AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOEL HOLLAND
In early 2018, University of Cambridge researchers built an online game that puts
players in the role of a propagandist. In one round, players can opt to impersonate the
president of the United States and declare war on North Korea while tweeting from a
fake account. In another round, they distort truth to incite conspiracy theories about
vaccines with emotionally charged headlines, while deflecting fact-checkers.
Along the way, players impersonate celebrities, manipulate photos, create sham news
sites, and build an army of Twitter bots to stoke anger and inflame social tension. They are
rewarded with badges for completing certain tasks and identifying misinformation techniques
commonly seen in false and misleading news stories—impersonation, conspiracy,
polarization, discrediting sources, trolling, and emotionally provocative content. To excel
in the game, players need to keep an eye on their followers and credibility meters at all
times. The more unscrupulous and devious they are, the greater their chances of winning.
Putting people in the position of fake newsmongers might sound sinister, but game
designers have legitimate reasons for walking people through the process of creating fake
news. “It trains people to be more attuned to the techniques that underpin most fake
news,” says Sander van der Linden, director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab,
which created the game Bad News in collaboration with DROG, a Dutch media collective.
VACCINE AGAINST DISINFORMATION
Inspired by the concept of vaccines using weaker or attenuated viruses to generate immunity,
Linden and his team created the game to see if they could preemptively debunk
fake news by exposing people to a weak dose of the methods used to create and spread
disinformation. They knew that they needed some creativity to make it work. “We wanted
to create mental antibodies against falsehoods, but we didn’t want to simply provide
facts in a boring way,” he says.
Initially, they created a board game where players competed to spread fake news by
using shady practices—such as conspiracy theories and inflammatory headlines—to
polarize people. They soon realized that the game needed a social media component and
created the online browser-based game with a simulated Twitter feed. Next, they added
a follower meter and a credibility meter, and now they provide instant scores of players’
performance. To gauge the effects of the game, players are asked to rate the reliability
of a series of different headlines and tweets before and after gameplay.
About half a million people have already played the initial English version of the game
that is now available in 14 languages. And about 15,000 players agreed to share their
information with Cambridge researchers.
Their study, published in the journal Palgrave Communications, shows that the gamified
simulation increases “psychological resistance” to fake news. Players were found to
be 21 percent less likely to believe fake news after completing the game. The impact of
impersonating celebrities and other personalities went down by 24 percent, and deliberately
polarizing headlines by 10 percent. Effectiveness of discrediting tactics—attacking
a legitimate source with accusations of bias—reduced by 19 percent, and conspiracy
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