News Literacy Project’s RumorGuard is a great tool to learn how to identify misinformation on social media. The site shows example social media posts and breaks down different aspects of the post that the user can identify as being falsified information. News Literacy Project identifies five key aspects to be aware of to protect yourself from misinformation: authenticity, source, evidence, context, and reasoning. They also go through different topics and themes of misinformation such as copypasta, doctored photos, and confirmation bias.
News Literacy Project provides a lot of great tools and information for someone to protect themselves against misinformation. But sometimes, we learn best by doing things for ourselves. I tried my hand at the game Fake It to Make It, a simulation game where you create your own fake news company to spread misinformation! How fun!
In the game, you “plant” articles in various social media groups to gain traction and create profits. There are different aspects of articles that can boost your reach, such as credibility, drama, and tagging based on the article’s themes and content. It gets more difficult once you have to write your own articles, adding different tags impact the articles credibility and drama. The game became very hard once it prompted me to create a “viral” article.
To go viral, your article needs to be dramatic and credible. After carefully going through all of the different tags and sources to create the most drama credibility I could for my article, I was still unable to make the article go viral.
It feels strange to play a game where the goal is the opposite of what your instinct want you to do. Getting a pop-up congratulating me on an article that increased hate crimes is not something I was particularly happy to see.
However, I believe that’s the point of a game like this. People who deliberately spread misinformation that actively hurts others in order to create a profit or push a certain agenda is a heinous activity. Knowing how these people work makes it easier to spot misinformation in the wild. It was easy to add tags that were inflammatory and instigated negative responses. At some point the game prompted me to plant an article that triggers happiness. Obviously, I went with an article about cute kittens, but it only got 5.
Personally, I know I’m a hands on learner. Sometimes, I just need to try things out for myself in order to fully understand something. I think playing games like this is extremely beneficial to better understand how it happens. It’s also much easier to get others interested in a game where you purposefully spread misinformation rather than reading articles about the same topic.
