It Is Fun and Games.
News Literacy Project’s Rumor Guard uses 5 factors to determine if the news is credible. The five factors are authenticity, source credibility, evidence, context, and reasoning. They also share PDFs, tutorials, and lessons to help you learn the techniques that will help you identify the factors. The idea behind the project is to arm the reader with the tools necessary to determine if what they are reading is authentic or if it is “fake news”.
There are many activities and materials listed in the techniques section. You can even take a news literacy quiz to determine how much you already know.
This tool is effective if the reader is committed to learning the skills that it aims to teach. You work through the lessons, which can be time-consuming.
Lessons like one created by Storyful, in the Rumor Guard list of techniques, teach us what to look for by using a video and authentication factors of their own. They use source, location, and date. The exercise has us look for things that we would use to verify if a posted video is the real thing by getting to the source first. They even share the method for finding metadata sourced from an original video or image. It is a fun, interactive, way to learn about what we should be looking for. It showed that just doing a quick search is a great method for finding out about the content we are looking at.
I enjoyed playing the game, Bad News. This interactive teaching tool allows people to learn how to create fake content and become a sort of fake news media mogul. It was fun and by seeing how easy it is to manipulate the shared content, I know how easy it is for someone to fool me! It is very scary. It also incorporated bots to send out Tweets based on my false content. Then other people start sharing the untrue information and it goes viral. It went from puppies to pillars of deception rather quickly. I felt on top of my disinformation game in no time. It was a little bit addicting.
It started with impersonating someone who is a credible media guru, playing on people’s emotions. Which was surprisingly easy to do using a meme stating that anti-aircraft guns were being used on puppies. Then I won false news supporters by using political polarization and conspiracies to support my total distortion of truth. I discredited the naysayers (fact-checkers) by deflecting onto their poor monetary habits. There was also trolling, which turned out to be a bit of fun. If it weren’t for my strong ethics and the teachings of journalism, I would have a great time creating fake content. It is easy to see why we need to know what things to be aware of.
These types of games are fantastic learning tools for teaching. Especially to a younger demographic whose lives are so intertwined with technology. The interactive, seemingly real-time gameplay content made it very fun and engaging.
Education games and interactive tools like these are the best tools for teaching us about misinformation. It arms us with the tools that we need to process the information as it comes our way. We may never be able to eradicate the untruths of the internet, but we can certainly be prepared to deal with them.
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