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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