from Terry Hayek
Want to help students learn to think critically about “fake news”? A simple, browser-based game can help.
What is bad news? Bad news is a simple tool to help students understand “fake news,” the (modern?) phenomenon of misinformation and “news content” spread, at least in part, by the rise of digital and social media.
(You can download fact sheet about created for educators.)
As an interactive experience, Bad News helps students understand how fake news works, why it becomes popular, and its underlying mechanisms and trends. It then allows players to choose certain fake news strategies, including emotional appeals, sarcasm, red herrings, personal attacks, and conspiracy theories.
It also introduces the concepts of content forms, allowing players to choose between fake news memes, photoshopped images, or actual “content” (news stories and articles, etc.), with some strategies (personal attacks) and forms (memes) working better than others depending on the topic of the fake news.
Match this with ours The Code of Cognitive Biases: A Visualization of 180+ Cognitive Biases and you may have the start of a crash course in critical thinking online.
Breaking Bad News: Strengths and Weaknesses
While I highly recommend the game as a learning tool, I did a few playthroughs of Bad News and came across a few areas where the experience could be improved – first and foremost, the “rating” mechanic, which asks users to rate the trustworthiness of certain social media posts.
While it makes sense in concept, in practice it’s not clear exactly what you’re evaluating for trustworthiness: the social media post, the user who shared the post, or the content frame in the post.
It’s also not meant to be a full fake news training simulation, so it’s pretty thin on what you can actually do in terms of mechanics – which limits some of the usefulness and can leave social media use in general feeling a bit like a drag.
However, when the game is at its best—letting you choose between disgusting disinformation tactics to gain “credibility”—it’s hard not to shake your head in disbelief at how little critical thinking we practice on a daily basis in our lives. And fake news and social media are perhaps just a microcosm.
The game is simple enough that you don’t need instructions, and if players make a mistake, it’s short enough to start over. As a kind of simulation it reminds of Plague, Inc., a sentiment reinforced by the developers of bad news, a stated mission to “vaccinate the world against misinformation.”
If you want to introduce students to the idea of fake news and the tactics used by media publishers to change consumer perceptions of news – and in turn reality itself – this is a brilliant little tool to get them started.
