It’s often said that to know your enemy, you must become your enemy – and when that enemy happens to be fake news, a new study of a game where players become “fake newsmongers” suggests it really does help.
The game in question is Bad News, developed by Dutch media platform DROG and scientists from the University of Cambridge as a way to “vaccinate” the public against disinformation. In pretending to be creators of fake news – the aim is to gain as many followers and as much ill-placed credibility as possible – players are exposed to real-life fake news strategies, such as political polarization, spreading conspiracy theories, and impersonating others.
Back in 2019, a study of 15,000 participants indicated that the game was successful at improving people’s ability to spot and resist disinformation, but the team was keen to see if the same results could be achieved in a more traditional educational setting: a secondary school classroom.
Coming from four different Swedish schools, 516 upper-secondary students aged 16 to 19 were first asked to complete a questionnaire that measured their ability to spot both manipulative and credible content, rating Twitter-like posts for how reliable they believed the post to be and providing a justification for it.
Then, the students were tasked with playing Bad News, either individually, in pairs, or as a whole class group. After playing, they filled out a post-test questionnaire that again measured their disinformation-spotting skills, as well as what they thought about the game.
Regardless of whether or not the student played the game by themselves, the study revealed that playing had a positive impact.
“The students improved their ability to identify manipulative techniques in social media posts and to distinguish between reliable and misleading news,” explained study author Thomas Nygren in a statement, though students who already held positive attitudes towards credible news sources were the best at doing so.
Many students were also better able to explain how they could spot the disinformation presented.
But before people start demanding the game be immediately added to curriculums everywhere, the authors do note some limitations: the study was conducted on students from just one country and only tested their ability to spot disinformation in a social media post. Future studies, they suggest, should investigate the impact of the game elsewhere and on assessing the credibility of an entire news article.
“This is an important step towards equipping young people with the tools they need to navigate in a world full of disinformation,” said Nygren. “We all need to become better at identifying manipulative strategies – prebunking, as it is known – since it is virtually impossible to discern deep fakes, for example, and other AI-generated disinformation with the naked eye.”
The study is published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.
Source Link: Want To Be Better At Spotting Fake News? Pretend To Be The Bad Guy
