The fake news game: actively inoculating against the risk of misinformation

Abstract

The rapid spread of online misinformation poses an increasing risk to societies worldwide. To help counter this, we developed a ‘fake news game’ in which participants are actively tasked with creating a news article about a strongly politicized issue (the European refugee crisis) using misleading tactics, from the perspective of different types of fake news producers. To pilot test the efficacy of the game, we conducted a randomized field study (N = 95) in a public high school setting. Results provide some preliminary evidence that playing the fake news game reduced the perceived reliability and persuasiveness of fake news articles. Overall, these findings suggest that educational games may be a promising vehicle to inoculate the public against fake news.

Keywords:

• Fake news
• inoculation theory
• misinformation
• post-truth
• influence

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ruurd Oosterwoud and Bob de Reus at DROG, as well as Dr. Wim Hilberdink, for coordinating the field experiments in the Netherlands. In addition, we thank the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and the Dutch Journalism Fund (Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek, SvdJ), which has provided funding to DROG, for their generous support.

Notes

1. https://trends.google.nl/trends/explore?q=fake%20news

2. Threat is not always manipulated, and there is some disagreement over its importance (see Banas and Rains 2010).

3. https://aboutbadnews.com/

4. https://www.coa.nl/en/

5. In the Dutch system, Hoger Algemeen Voortgezet Onderwijs (HAVO) and Voorbereidend Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs (VWO) are higher educational divisions that prepare high school students for university-level education.

6. There were two control and two treatment groups that were approximately the same size on paper, but on the day of the experiment there were more absentees in the control group, resulting in the observed imbalance.

7. All of our research hypotheses were directional (see p.7) and evaluated as such using one-tailed p-values (for guidelines, see Cho and Abe 2013 and Jones 1952).

8. The presence of a significant main effect is not a prerequisite for mediation to occur, especially when power to detect an effect is relatively low (Rucker et al. 2011).

9. We acknowledge that the negative framing of the articles in general may have contributed to eliciting negative affect but this in itself does not explain significant between-group differences in reported affect levels.