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‘Pre-bunk’ game reduces susceptibility to disinformation

377 points by EndXA 7y ago

jstanley 7y ago
The game is at https://getbadnews.com/#intro https://getbadnews.com/#intro but unfortunately it is down.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  HN hug of death?
  - EE84M3i 7y ago
    Reddit, it's on the top of /r/all from /r/science - https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c5ptfz/fake_news_vaccine_works_suggests_a_large_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c5ptfz/fake_news_v...
mlanting 7y ago
I like how this links to the same site that the currently trending HN post "I was 7 words away from being spear-phished" involved :P (note: no reason to believe THIS post is phishing, just funny to see the same url)
- v01dlight 7y ago
  I thought the same since I read that right before! glances at URL eyes narrow "Not this time..."
- sb057 7y ago
  Doubly ironic since "Simple online game reduces susceptibility to disinformation" is exactly seven words long.
- CameronBanga 7y ago
  Really glad I'm not in Firefox right now.
EndXA 7y ago
Key quote from the article: To gauge the effects of the game, players were asked to rate the reliability of a series of different headlines and tweets before and after gameplay. They were randomly allocated a mixture of real (“control”) and fake news (“treatment”). The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news. The researchers also found that those who registered as most susceptible to fake news headlines at the outset benefited most from the “inoculation”. “We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden. The original study can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0279-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0279-9
- steventhedev 7y ago
  Unless I missed it, it looks like they didn't control for the effects of their own survey. For all we know, taking 15 minutes to drink tea between ranking news reliability.
  - bongobongo 7y ago
    You missed it
- null000 7y ago
  I played through the game and did the pre- and post- game study. At the beginning, I tried pretty hard to genuinely gauge reliability, and was more willing to use some nuance (maybe I don't think the tweet is written fairly, but it touches on a genuine trend, so I'll give it a 3/10). There was also one that I just let slip by me (HBO tweet with some random characters that I realized probably weren't intentional markers to dodge trademarks after I instinctively hit 10/10 reliability, and also you can't go back and correct yourself). After the game I was just so worn out I didn't feel like giving any credence to anything. Looks like you're kinda emotional? 1/10. Talking about an opinion instead of a fact? 1/10. From a celebrity? 1/10. It also looked like they weren't throwing in many or any tweets that were supposed to be "credible" or "reliable" in the feed. I'd be interested in seeing the results 2 or 3 weeks out, and with a more even mix of "credible" and "non-credible" tweets. I have the suspicion the results won't stick, or at least won't stick well.
adrianmonk 7y ago
This is intriguing. Assuming more research confirms this effect, I'd go so far as to say it should be taught in schools and should be a standard part of everyone's education. Imagine a society where everyone has a stronger resistance to disinformation. It seems like it could only be a good thing.
- Swizec 7y ago
  But then how will you build societal cohesion through propaganda? Could be a double-edged sword
  - goodrobotiswear 7y ago
    We dont need propaganda to stop people from fighting with each other. Diversity is a strength.
    - Gabriel_Martin 7y ago
      And yet some contend otherwise. It would be a great presidential debate question, fill in the blank: Diversity is _______
      - bilbo0s 7y ago
        >Diversity is _______... ...a fact. Information leading people to, say, shoot up synagogues or churches in a misplaced struggle against that fact based reality is likely disinformation. But my view is a lot more based on pragmatism than most.
      - peteretep 7y ago
        > It would be a great presidential debate question No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet!
  - bongobongo 7y ago
    Relying on propaganda for social stability is a recipe for authoritarianism.
lostmymind66 7y ago
The problem is that real reporting costs money and the bottom fell out of the industry awhile back, so what we now have is lots of people repeating what they saw on Twitter or Facebook and making up the rest..which is passed off as 'news'.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  There's something to this, I think; at least in the form of articles that have a headline suggesting strong public outcry to {event} "___(Nebulous group of people)___ are furious about__(thing)___", but upon reading the article we find that the nebulous group of people that the writer is sourcing from are in reality two people on twitter who were, at best, mildly chuffed.
ben_jones 7y ago
As someone who played a lot of MMOs growing up I think there is a Part 2 to this study that will be interesting to see: does this critical thinking atrophy over time? I think there is a continuous pressure for negligent behavior that heavily outweighs any good attempts to educate people of privacy, finance, health, news, and many other categories. :(
- mistermann 7y ago
  > does this critical thinking atrophy over time? And also, will fake news mutate in order to overcome the learned defenses, similar to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Actually, I would say we're already well past that point, there's plenty of propaganda that intelligent people are completely oblivious to, some of it is harmful, but much of it is beneficial.
lubesGordi 7y ago
If only we could "inoculate" people against mainstream media, then we'd really be talking.
- pcunite 7y ago
  That is literally what the game looks for. It offers the player the option to tweet "The Mainstream media is one massive conspiracy". It punishes the player if they choose options not in line with ethical journalistic behavior (as defined by the game). So, things like questioning the events of 9/11, vaccines, and other taboo subjects affect your score. questions were framed as tweets from legitimate news organizations that did not include any attempts at misleading the audience. It will be interesting to see what the data coming from this research and what Google's response will be to this week's Google employee insider reporting that Google controls online narratives. Something is tampering with news data. Is it the lonely people in their basements (by the tens of thousands), a conspiracy, or machine Learning?
empath75 7y ago
Was there data on whether it made people distrust reliable and accurate sources?
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Paragraph 8: > the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.
- jadell 7y ago
  It appears it didn't change their pre-existing ratings of those sources. From the article: The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of real-life fanfic before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
goodrobotiswear 7y ago
Has anyone found a link to the wording of the headlines?
papln 7y ago
How do you get past "Loading..." on https://getbadnews.com/#intro https://getbadnews.com/#intro , starting from bsaic ad-blocking config? Or is the site hugged to death? "502 Request Error The page you requested generated a server error and could not be processed."
maxaht 7y ago
The Indiana University Social Media Observatory created something similar: https://fakey.iuni.iu.edu/ https://fakey.iuni.iu.edu/ It's interesting to play through, and they've created other tools such as Twitter bot detectors to help curb disinformation: https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/ https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/
your-nanny 7y ago
There may be some signature that identifies real-world fakes, in the same way that the Onion, well smells like an onion. But, I have a general criticism about this area of research, which seems to conflate the semantic truth. value of content with the content itself, for example in statements like "fake news spreads faster" (veracity is an extrinsic property of data, and not one that is cognitively accessible to its consumers, and so can have no causal role in it's dissemination). Instead, the relevant variables can only be things like: sensationalism, accords with priors, emotional response, etc. Still, when it
- StrictDabbler 7y ago
  This isn't about using semantic markers to identify inaccurate news. It is about identifying synthetic news. "A lie will go around the world before the truth has got it's boots on." -Mark Twain, 1919 He said that way before "fake news". How did he recognize this? He saw that it's trivial to make a lie people want to tell, and that truth is by comparison less often compelling. This seems so obvious, but it's so little known. At this point when I read a story online that makes me want to tell somebody else, where I feel "why doesn't everybody know about this", I start fact-checking. That's all accuracy takes. Just that little bit of skepticism. For example, that Mark Twain quote I gave is total bull. Twain died in 1910 and the quote is actually a distorted version of this: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;" -Johnathan Swift, 1787 Why do I know this? Am I that conversant in satirical literature? Nope. The shape of my desire to include that well-known misquotation in my reply signaled me that it might not be real. I'm not kidding. It was too much fun. So I looked it up, saw the irony, and left the misquotation in to make a point. That's the force we have to fight. Anything that feels Snopesish is suspicious. Is it true that Obama was doing the same thing to asylum-seekers that Trump is? No. Is it true that Trump started the whole asylum detention program because he hates immigrants? No. Is it true that the asylum program has a decades-long and complicated history, that the current administration has focused attention on the border to deflect from a dozen other issues its facing, thereby highlighting the detention program, and that a series of inhumane missteps have been made in managing that program, demonstrably causing a new level of suffering, because the people currently in charge tend to view that suffering as a form of justice for what they believe is a threatening criminal act? Yeah. That's mostly true. It's also not very much fun to say.
ARandomerDude 7y ago
> A minute ago you were just an angry citizen, now you're a big shot editor-in-chief running a real news site. That statement is incredibly condescending.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  It’s in the context of the story in the game. You first play “one angry citizen”, then you “make a news website and call yourself editor-in-chief” at their request. It’s not condescending. It’s just fun.
gfodor 7y ago
The "best" fake news these days is the stuff that doesn't register even to people are read-in on the usual anti-patterns. Subtle framing, selective quotation, anonymous sources, "repeat the lie" techniques, and so on, are the ones that I see happening today that are hard to immunize yourself from. Ironically, the people who fall for these are more likely to self-identify as being aware and clued in on how to avoid fake news.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  And so so many people can't even spot the "usual anti-patterns." I gotta believe that starting with the basic stuff will be the first step to getting better at recognizing the less basic stuff. The same techniques could potentially help people recognize the less basic stuff, teach them how to do it. But I think an equal and opposite problem is that these days people don't believe "real" news as much as they believe "fake" news. They accuse anything that they don't like of being 'fake news' and refuse to believe it, no matter how extensively reported. I really don't know what to do about that, but I still gotta think that developing basic 'news literacy' skills anywhere is the foundation for more advanced.
  - pault 7y ago
    > But I think an equal and opposite problem is that these days people don't believe "real" news as much as they believe "fake" news. This is the endgame, and the reason fake news exists. There's no better way to destabilize a democracy than to cast doubt upon all journalism. Democracy depends on a well-informed populace, and if all information becomes subjective it cannot continue to function.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  Precisely, the subtle "bias" in traditional news is extremely powerful to pull mindshare this way or that. It's not tabloid level shit like spacemen are coming to get you, but wrapped as trustworthy articles vetted by sources, studies or science.
  - mwfunk 7y ago
toss1 7y ago
Seems an excellent start, very worthy of extended efforts. I'm curious about the durability of the 'inoculation' effect. Do players revert to their old assessments soon, after a long period, or are their perceptions permanently shifted (e.g., they can't 'unsee' the effects that they've now seen in action)?
r00fus 7y ago
So you mean Fox News?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Every major network pushes their own narrative. I wouldn't single Fox News out at all.
  - dymk 7y ago
    "Both sides do it!" is a really unconvincing argument. Watch an hour of prime-time CNN and prime-time Fox News, and it's obvious that Fox is more willing to stretch the truth, mislead watchers, and spread FUD.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      So, a little nicer misinformation is OK?
      - dymk 7y ago
        Where did I say it’s okay? I said both sides are not equal, and conservative news outlets are worse than liberal ones. I believe that trend holds for conservatism in general. Is your defense of Fox News “nobody else is perfect, so why should anyone be held to any standard”?
        ddingus 7y ago
        I dislike FOX and am not defending them. The major media companies are all doing a terrible job. Being better than FOX is a very low bar. I am saying that inequality does not matter all that much on a growing number of issues.
        ddingus 7y ago
        Regarding standards, which you are in agreement with me on in terms of identifying them: Clarity in the majors is pretty low right now. Transparency in bias. Bias is not really getting an honest discussion on the major networks right now. It should. And the moment it does, there are issues to work through. Some of those may be costly to the majors too. On some topics, and I have a random list here, bias gets in the way, and the only real discussion is side discussion like ours happening right now: War (framing in terms of it being generally good, necessary) Economics (No labor point of view) Media / Internet (Neutrality, impact of massive consolidation, access journalism...) In any case, just know I was not intending to make any negative statements your way. Just asked the question to provoke some discussion, nothing more.
Ill_ban_myself 7y ago
played the game. It felt like I was taking a "push poll" where I'm being asked if I understand a conclusion being drawn for me. I found it to be less than compelling to say the least.
- baq 7y ago
  it's a tutorial on how to run a fake news profile that kinda turns into a game in the last 3 minutes where you actually have to skip a few memes to increase your score
gambler 7y ago
Every time I read about some new clever way to fight "fake news" I ask the same question. Can this method be used to reinforce any arbitrarily chosen agenda or does it work because there is something fundamentally wrong with the information it targets?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gambler 7y ago
  Reading the paper. Too bad the game itself is down. Something that caught my attention: >For the question about discrediting we used a different non-existent news site (“International Post Online”), employing an ad hominem (Walton, 1998) argument against the mainstream media: The Mainstream Media has been caught in so many lies that it can’t be trusted as a reliable news source. #FakeNews. This is not news. This is an opinion. Since when does expressing low opinion of the mainstream media counts as spreading fake news?
  - charlchi 7y ago
    Many people have the political goal of upholding the mainstream narrative. Think about it this way, France recently held the "Christ Church Call"[1] after some random insane guy in New Zealand shot up a mosque, killing 50 muslims. That means we have to censor and ban any rightwing/conservative content. Meanwhile it came out that France also sold 20 billion Euro in weapons to Saudi Arabia[2]. Guess which one gets more news coverage? The UN recently said it's going to start policing hate speech as well[3]. People have reasons not to trust mainstream news. The level at which we are willing to defend mainstream narratives backed by billions in funding is ridiculous... Fake news about migrants or whatever isn't much better, but whatever we're doing at the moment, largely defending the mainstream, isn't working. We're setting up a police state where only state approved narratives are allowed. let me remind you the current secretary general of the UN was also the president of the Socialist International... [1] https://www.christchurchcall.com/ https://www.christchurchcall.com/ [2] https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-france-confirms-contested-arms-shipment-saudi-arabia https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-france-confirms-contest... [3] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040731 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040731
khawkins 7y ago
"Fake news" isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a mainstream media landscape which has sacrificed its credibility for partisanship, activism, and sensationalism. People are willing to believe new sources because they don't know who to trust.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Which is a lesson in itself isn't it? How can we be sure there even exists an objective reality when not only can we not trust what we learn second hand, but also cannot trust our own senses or memory? We are in the awkward position of simultaneously needing to be skeptical of our understanding of the world while simultaneously having no choice but to act as though it were correct.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  I don't think people believe facebook posts about lizard masons controlling the government because mainstream media is biased.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  Where does mainstream end? Is HN mainstream? Reddit? Twitter? Breitbart? Fox? The problem with dichotomous categorization is it loses a lot of information. These are all offenders in vastly different ways, best not to lump and over generalize about them.
  - krapp 7y ago
    When people talk about the "mainstream media" in this context, they tend to mean established pre-web mass media - television, radio and newspaper, and any official web presence by these companies. So Reddit no, Twitter no, Breitbart no, Fox yes.
tareqak 7y ago
There are similar games on Steam. I have both of these: 1. Headliner: https://store.steampowered.com/app/680980/HEADLINER/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/680980/HEADLINER/ 2. Headliner: NoviNews https://store.steampowered.com/app/918820/Headliner_NoviNews/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/918820/Headliner_NoviNews... There is also one by Nicky Case that I've played too: We Become What We Behold - https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb I recommend them all.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
olivermarks 7y ago
'It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled' Making people take push poll style 'tests' and asking them to then believe they are more discerning is really stretching it. The larger issue today is arguably suppressed information, which leads people when they find it to jump to conclusions based on lack of contextual data. Ass in 'official' versions of events that don't make sense and you are feeding a wildfire of paranoia
deleted 7y ago
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dwighttk 7y ago
let me know when this is replicated a few times
germanlee 7y ago
Rather than being an honest game to reduce "disinformation", this game is simply defending mainstream media. It's message is essentially "trust mainstream media". Not that shocking coming from cambridge considering they are at the forefront of cultural war being waged in the west today. How about get opinion/news from a wide variety of sources ( mainstream and fringe, big and small, national and international, right and left, globalist and nationalist, etc )? That's the only reliable way to wade through all the disinformation. Especially regarding controversial, cultural, military, trade and geopolitical issues. If you are getting your "news" from one source then you are getting propaganda and lies. How many wars have we been sold on lies by the media? And yet, we are expected to trust them regardless of their lies. And that's just the most glaring and obvious example. For example, with the recent hong kong protests. It would have been nice to see what the chinese media or asian media were also saying about the issue. I suspect it's a lot different than the "news" we've been seeing about it in the US. If we are interested in the "truth", then it would be nice to see what iranians/iranian media and the media of nearby countries are saying. Rather than just a one sided pro-war "news". But I suspect that neither cambridge nor the media they are protecting truly care about "news, disinformation, fake news, etc".
- SantalBlush 7y ago
  This is 100% false. It is an "appeal to the middle" fallacy based on two assumptions: 1. that all news sources are equally biased; 2. that aggregating those biases produces an unbiased result. Neither of these assumptions are credible.
  - germanlee 7y ago
    1. I didn't say all news sources are "equally biased". Saying all news sources are biased is not the same as saying equally biased. Some are obvious more biased and more propagandistic than others. But without a doubt, every news source has biases. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to look into the history of every news company. Who created them, funded them and who is running them. But I suspect you already know this. 2. I didn't say the "aggregates" produce an unbiased result. I didn't mention anything about "aggregates". Seeing different opinions exposes to you the biases of every news source. If you just watch foxnews or cnn all day, you won't be able to pick up on the bias. But if you watch both, the biases of both become blatantly obvious. I'm not saying watching both somehow magically makes CNN or Foxnews "objective" and "honest". Quite the opposite. 3. Neither of those assumptions are credible because I didn't make them. You made those assumptions in an attempt to defend mainstream media. Which I see all over social media recently. Every comment about being skeptical about media ( especially mainstream media ) gets met with your type of comment. Makes me wonder.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Yeah, they claim this supposed study showed the game increased resistance to fake news, but how do we know that's really true!?
ilaksh 7y ago
The problem with everything related to "fake news" is that it is not in the context of establishment propaganda. Effectively it is an attempt to co-opt the concept of propaganda but with the supposed idea that there is a certain authoritative group that will tell you what's real and always presents just the facts in an impartial way. It's quite amazing. What they have done is to create an enthusiasm for censorship. The net effect is actually the opposite of what it is advertised to be. It enforces top-down information control. In a similar vein, Libra is advertised as a real cryptocurrency that can act as a digital cash. And yet it is actually an attempt to replace real cryptocurrencies with something that can be controlled, easily tracked, and profited from by the companies it was designed to disintermediate.
jrochkind1 7y ago
It makes total sense that the way to learn to spot it, is to practice making it. Analogous to how you can't do defensive IT security unless you understand how people do offensive.
nautilus12 7y ago
Too bad that reality isn't cut and dry enough that you can even define "fake news" unambiguosly, which opens all sides up to enforcing censorship of their particular spin.
uses 7y ago
ITT: "but the real fake news is the lying MSM!", etc.
- TomMckenny 7y ago
  The revelation that misinformation campaigns catering to preconceptions are not actually reality based is an existential threat to extremism. Any post showing that will draw them like flies. The other popular response seems to be "the article and game are bogus". Not sure how the two are reconciled of course.
throwaway5752 7y ago
In case anyone has just skipped the article to post here without reading, you can play the game here: https://getbadnews.com/#play https://getbadnews.com/#play It helps to play it to understand what they are trying to accomplish.
nixpulvis 7y ago
The post about how we live in a low trust society (or at least more so due to the internet) is really ringing true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155
hirundo 7y ago
It's a shame that now when I see Cambridge as a news source I think of their shabby treatment of Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl and discount it somewhat before reading it ... because there are still many fine scholars there.
aaron695 7y ago
Lol, another game that can help people. They will 'play' it why? I can name the amount of games people will play that are helpful or educational to a topic on my hand (ie The old version of WITWICS and ....... I've actually seen another, but it was in a forced setting) I also doubt the study, but it's a moot point, it's another lets create a "game" to stop "fake news" lingo for more funding from suckers rort.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
Skepticism should be the default position on every issue. We should be teaching the Socratic Method to our children rather than a "core curriculum" that is designed to program them to become workers in an economic system that is rapidly crumbling and will no longer exist in a short period of time. Teaching people how to think is far more important than any specific piece of information. The problem those in government and the upper echelon of society has in this regard is that they want it both ways. They want a population that uncritically accepts government propaganda, but rejects "fake news" (propaganda and disinformation from other, non-governmental sources). Since the creation of the public school system, people have been conditioned to uncritically accept information (which wasn't a problem for the government when there were only 3 television channels that all broadcast permutations of the same government-approved message). With the explosion of the internet and social media, the government has lost control of the narrative, with a population conditioned to uncritically accept information being blasted by a variety of actors from a multitude of sources. The election of carnival barker Donald Trump (and the rejection of Hillary Clinton, universally backed by the entire establishment) was the ultimate warning bell. Those at the top are desperate to regain control of the narrative (rather than teaching people how to think, which would also preclude government propaganda from being effective). This is why we see such an avalanche of censorship, information control and an attack on free speech (on Wikileaks and beyond) coming from government officials and their allies in big tech.
emilfihlman 7y ago
>buy twitter bots I was pretty disappointed the game was "you'll lose if you do the stupid thing!!11!". Bots are not that good and are rather visible as bullshit.
alexmlamb 7y ago
Why don't mainstream newspapers (like NYTimes, Economist, etc) include a list of citations at the end of articles the way that scientific papers do? It seems like this would be easy to do, and would help to restore a lot of trust, because people could easily see if they like the sources being referenced and if the sources are actually fairly represented in the article.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fuckingGAYYYY 7y ago
What a load of shit. It's a fucking choose your own adventure, and you can yes it to death without reading a word. The game does nothing.
fuckingGAYYYY 7y ago
NO U
tictoc 7y ago
Conspiracy Theories make a lot of assertions and hardly ever provide the proof. They just say it, and move along. If you don't get it, you are an ingrate fool.

377 points by EndXA 7y ago

jstanley 7y ago

The game is at https://getbadnews.com/#intro https://getbadnews.com/#intro but unfortunately it is down.

creaghpatr 7y ago
HN hug of death?
- EE84M3i 7y ago
  Reddit, it's on the top of /r/all from /r/science - https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c5ptfz/fake_news_vaccine_works_suggests_a_large_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/c5ptfz/fake_news_v...

mlanting 7y ago

I like how this links to the same site that the currently trending HN post "I was 7 words away from being spear-phished" involved :P (note: no reason to believe THIS post is phishing, just funny to see the same url)

v01dlight 7y ago
I thought the same since I read that right before! glances at URL eyes narrow "Not this time..."
sb057 7y ago
Doubly ironic since "Simple online game reduces susceptibility to disinformation" is exactly seven words long.
CameronBanga 7y ago
Really glad I'm not in Firefox right now.

EndXA 7y ago

Key quote from the article: To gauge the effects of the game, players were asked to rate the reliability of a series of different headlines and tweets before and after gameplay. They were randomly allocated a mixture of real (“control”) and fake news (“treatment”). The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news. The researchers also found that those who registered as most susceptible to fake news headlines at the outset benefited most from the “inoculation”. “We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden. The original study can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0279-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0279-9

steventhedev 7y ago
Unless I missed it, it looks like they didn't control for the effects of their own survey. For all we know, taking 15 minutes to drink tea between ranking news reliability.
- bongobongo 7y ago
  You missed it
null000 7y ago
I played through the game and did the pre- and post- game study. At the beginning, I tried pretty hard to genuinely gauge reliability, and was more willing to use some nuance (maybe I don't think the tweet is written fairly, but it touches on a genuine trend, so I'll give it a 3/10). There was also one that I just let slip by me (HBO tweet with some random characters that I realized probably weren't intentional markers to dodge trademarks after I instinctively hit 10/10 reliability, and also you can't go back and correct yourself). After the game I was just so worn out I didn't feel like giving any credence to anything. Looks like you're kinda emotional? 1/10. Talking about an opinion instead of a fact? 1/10. From a celebrity? 1/10. It also looked like they weren't throwing in many or any tweets that were supposed to be "credible" or "reliable" in the feed. I'd be interested in seeing the results 2 or 3 weeks out, and with a more even mix of "credible" and "non-credible" tweets. I have the suspicion the results won't stick, or at least won't stick well.

adrianmonk 7y ago

This is intriguing. Assuming more research confirms this effect, I'd go so far as to say it should be taught in schools and should be a standard part of everyone's education. Imagine a society where everyone has a stronger resistance to disinformation. It seems like it could only be a good thing.

Swizec 7y ago
But then how will you build societal cohesion through propaganda? Could be a double-edged sword
- goodrobotiswear 7y ago
  We dont need propaganda to stop people from fighting with each other. Diversity is a strength.
  - Gabriel_Martin 7y ago
    And yet some contend otherwise. It would be a great presidential debate question, fill in the blank: Diversity is _______
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Diversity is _______... ...a fact. Information leading people to, say, shoot up synagogues or churches in a misplaced struggle against that fact based reality is likely disinformation. But my view is a lot more based on pragmatism than most.
    - peteretep 7y ago
      > It would be a great presidential debate question No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet!
- bongobongo 7y ago
  Relying on propaganda for social stability is a recipe for authoritarianism.

lostmymind66 7y ago

The problem is that real reporting costs money and the bottom fell out of the industry awhile back, so what we now have is lots of people repeating what they saw on Twitter or Facebook and making up the rest..which is passed off as 'news'.

dvtrn 7y ago
There's something to this, I think; at least in the form of articles that have a headline suggesting strong public outcry to {event} "___(Nebulous group of people)___ are furious about__(thing)___", but upon reading the article we find that the nebulous group of people that the writer is sourcing from are in reality two people on twitter who were, at best, mildly chuffed.

ben_jones 7y ago

As someone who played a lot of MMOs growing up I think there is a Part 2 to this study that will be interesting to see: does this critical thinking atrophy over time? I think there is a continuous pressure for negligent behavior that heavily outweighs any good attempts to educate people of privacy, finance, health, news, and many other categories. :(

mistermann 7y ago
> does this critical thinking atrophy over time? And also, will fake news mutate in order to overcome the learned defenses, similar to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Actually, I would say we're already well past that point, there's plenty of propaganda that intelligent people are completely oblivious to, some of it is harmful, but much of it is beneficial.

lubesGordi 7y ago

If only we could "inoculate" people against mainstream media, then we'd really be talking.

pcunite 7y ago
That is literally what the game looks for. It offers the player the option to tweet "The Mainstream media is one massive conspiracy". It punishes the player if they choose options not in line with ethical journalistic behavior (as defined by the game). So, things like questioning the events of 9/11, vaccines, and other taboo subjects affect your score. questions were framed as tweets from legitimate news organizations that did not include any attempts at misleading the audience. It will be interesting to see what the data coming from this research and what Google's response will be to this week's Google employee insider reporting that Google controls online narratives. Something is tampering with news data. Is it the lonely people in their basements (by the tens of thousands), a conspiracy, or machine Learning?

empath75 7y ago

Was there data on whether it made people distrust reliable and accurate sources?

ricardobeat 7y ago
Paragraph 8: > the perceived reliability of fake news before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.
jadell 7y ago
It appears it didn't change their pre-existing ratings of those sources. From the article: The study, published today in the journal Palgrave Communications, showed the perceived reliability of real-life fanfic before playing the game had reduced by an average of 21% after completing it. Yet the game made no difference to how users ranked real news.

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goodrobotiswear 7y ago

Has anyone found a link to the wording of the headlines?

papln 7y ago

How do you get past "Loading..." on https://getbadnews.com/#intro https://getbadnews.com/#intro , starting from bsaic ad-blocking config? Or is the site hugged to death? "502 Request Error The page you requested generated a server error and could not be processed."

maxaht 7y ago

The Indiana University Social Media Observatory created something similar: https://fakey.iuni.iu.edu/ https://fakey.iuni.iu.edu/ It's interesting to play through, and they've created other tools such as Twitter bot detectors to help curb disinformation: https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/ https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/

your-nanny 7y ago

There may be some signature that identifies real-world fakes, in the same way that the Onion, well smells like an onion. But, I have a general criticism about this area of research, which seems to conflate the semantic truth. value of content with the content itself, for example in statements like "fake news spreads faster" (veracity is an extrinsic property of data, and not one that is cognitively accessible to its consumers, and so can have no causal role in it's dissemination). Instead, the relevant variables can only be things like: sensationalism, accords with priors, emotional response, etc. Still, when it

StrictDabbler 7y ago
This isn't about using semantic markers to identify inaccurate news. It is about identifying synthetic news. "A lie will go around the world before the truth has got it's boots on." -Mark Twain, 1919 He said that way before "fake news". How did he recognize this? He saw that it's trivial to make a lie people want to tell, and that truth is by comparison less often compelling. This seems so obvious, but it's so little known. At this point when I read a story online that makes me want to tell somebody else, where I feel "why doesn't everybody know about this", I start fact-checking. That's all accuracy takes. Just that little bit of skepticism. For example, that Mark Twain quote I gave is total bull. Twain died in 1910 and the quote is actually a distorted version of this: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;" -Johnathan Swift, 1787 Why do I know this? Am I that conversant in satirical literature? Nope. The shape of my desire to include that well-known misquotation in my reply signaled me that it might not be real. I'm not kidding. It was too much fun. So I looked it up, saw the irony, and left the misquotation in to make a point. That's the force we have to fight. Anything that feels Snopesish is suspicious. Is it true that Obama was doing the same thing to asylum-seekers that Trump is? No. Is it true that Trump started the whole asylum detention program because he hates immigrants? No. Is it true that the asylum program has a decades-long and complicated history, that the current administration has focused attention on the border to deflect from a dozen other issues its facing, thereby highlighting the detention program, and that a series of inhumane missteps have been made in managing that program, demonstrably causing a new level of suffering, because the people currently in charge tend to view that suffering as a form of justice for what they believe is a threatening criminal act? Yeah. That's mostly true. It's also not very much fun to say.

ARandomerDude 7y ago

> A minute ago you were just an angry citizen, now you're a big shot editor-in-chief running a real news site. That statement is incredibly condescending.

scarejunba 7y ago
It’s in the context of the story in the game. You first play “one angry citizen”, then you “make a news website and call yourself editor-in-chief” at their request. It’s not condescending. It’s just fun.

gfodor 7y ago

The "best" fake news these days is the stuff that doesn't register even to people are read-in on the usual anti-patterns. Subtle framing, selective quotation, anonymous sources, "repeat the lie" techniques, and so on, are the ones that I see happening today that are hard to immunize yourself from. Ironically, the people who fall for these are more likely to self-identify as being aware and clued in on how to avoid fake news.

jrochkind1 7y ago
And so so many people can't even spot the "usual anti-patterns." I gotta believe that starting with the basic stuff will be the first step to getting better at recognizing the less basic stuff. The same techniques could potentially help people recognize the less basic stuff, teach them how to do it. But I think an equal and opposite problem is that these days people don't believe "real" news as much as they believe "fake" news. They accuse anything that they don't like of being 'fake news' and refuse to believe it, no matter how extensively reported. I really don't know what to do about that, but I still gotta think that developing basic 'news literacy' skills anywhere is the foundation for more advanced.
- pault 7y ago
  > But I think an equal and opposite problem is that these days people don't believe "real" news as much as they believe "fake" news. This is the endgame, and the reason fake news exists. There's no better way to destabilize a democracy than to cast doubt upon all journalism. Democracy depends on a well-informed populace, and if all information becomes subjective it cannot continue to function.
eanzenberg 7y ago
Precisely, the subtle "bias" in traditional news is extremely powerful to pull mindshare this way or that. It's not tabloid level shit like spacemen are coming to get you, but wrapped as trustworthy articles vetted by sources, studies or science.
- mwfunk 7y ago

toss1 7y ago

Seems an excellent start, very worthy of extended efforts. I'm curious about the durability of the 'inoculation' effect. Do players revert to their old assessments soon, after a long period, or are their perceptions permanently shifted (e.g., they can't 'unsee' the effects that they've now seen in action)?

r00fus 7y ago

So you mean Fox News?

cameronbrown 7y ago
Every major network pushes their own narrative. I wouldn't single Fox News out at all.
- dymk 7y ago
  "Both sides do it!" is a really unconvincing argument. Watch an hour of prime-time CNN and prime-time Fox News, and it's obvious that Fox is more willing to stretch the truth, mislead watchers, and spread FUD.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    So, a little nicer misinformation is OK?
    - dymk 7y ago
      Where did I say it’s okay? I said both sides are not equal, and conservative news outlets are worse than liberal ones. I believe that trend holds for conservatism in general. Is your defense of Fox News “nobody else is perfect, so why should anyone be held to any standard”?
      - ddingus 7y ago
        I dislike FOX and am not defending them. The major media companies are all doing a terrible job. Being better than FOX is a very low bar. I am saying that inequality does not matter all that much on a growing number of issues.
      - ddingus 7y ago
        Regarding standards, which you are in agreement with me on in terms of identifying them: Clarity in the majors is pretty low right now. Transparency in bias. Bias is not really getting an honest discussion on the major networks right now. It should. And the moment it does, there are issues to work through. Some of those may be costly to the majors too. On some topics, and I have a random list here, bias gets in the way, and the only real discussion is side discussion like ours happening right now: War (framing in terms of it being generally good, necessary) Economics (No labor point of view) Media / Internet (Neutrality, impact of massive consolidation, access journalism...) In any case, just know I was not intending to make any negative statements your way. Just asked the question to provoke some discussion, nothing more.

Ill_ban_myself 7y ago

played the game. It felt like I was taking a "push poll" where I'm being asked if I understand a conclusion being drawn for me. I found it to be less than compelling to say the least.

baq 7y ago
it's a tutorial on how to run a fake news profile that kinda turns into a game in the last 3 minutes where you actually have to skip a few memes to increase your score

gambler 7y ago

Every time I read about some new clever way to fight "fake news" I ask the same question. Can this method be used to reinforce any arbitrarily chosen agenda or does it work because there is something fundamentally wrong with the information it targets?

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gambler 7y ago
Reading the paper. Too bad the game itself is down. Something that caught my attention: >For the question about discrediting we used a different non-existent news site (“International Post Online”), employing an ad hominem (Walton, 1998) argument against the mainstream media: The Mainstream Media has been caught in so many lies that it can’t be trusted as a reliable news source. #FakeNews. This is not news. This is an opinion. Since when does expressing low opinion of the mainstream media counts as spreading fake news?
- charlchi 7y ago
  Many people have the political goal of upholding the mainstream narrative. Think about it this way, France recently held the "Christ Church Call"[1] after some random insane guy in New Zealand shot up a mosque, killing 50 muslims. That means we have to censor and ban any rightwing/conservative content. Meanwhile it came out that France also sold 20 billion Euro in weapons to Saudi Arabia[2]. Guess which one gets more news coverage? The UN recently said it's going to start policing hate speech as well[3]. People have reasons not to trust mainstream news. The level at which we are willing to defend mainstream narratives backed by billions in funding is ridiculous... Fake news about migrants or whatever isn't much better, but whatever we're doing at the moment, largely defending the mainstream, isn't working. We're setting up a police state where only state approved narratives are allowed. let me remind you the current secretary general of the UN was also the president of the Socialist International... [1] https://www.christchurchcall.com/ https://www.christchurchcall.com/ [2] https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-france-confirms-contested-arms-shipment-saudi-arabia https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-france-confirms-contest... [3] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040731 https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040731

khawkins 7y ago

"Fake news" isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a mainstream media landscape which has sacrificed its credibility for partisanship, activism, and sensationalism. People are willing to believe new sources because they don't know who to trust.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Which is a lesson in itself isn't it? How can we be sure there even exists an objective reality when not only can we not trust what we learn second hand, but also cannot trust our own senses or memory? We are in the awkward position of simultaneously needing to be skeptical of our understanding of the world while simultaneously having no choice but to act as though it were correct.
throwaway2048 7y ago
I don't think people believe facebook posts about lizard masons controlling the government because mainstream media is biased.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Where does mainstream end? Is HN mainstream? Reddit? Twitter? Breitbart? Fox? The problem with dichotomous categorization is it loses a lot of information. These are all offenders in vastly different ways, best not to lump and over generalize about them.
- krapp 7y ago
  When people talk about the "mainstream media" in this context, they tend to mean established pre-web mass media - television, radio and newspaper, and any official web presence by these companies. So Reddit no, Twitter no, Breitbart no, Fox yes.

tareqak 7y ago

There are similar games on Steam. I have both of these: 1. Headliner: https://store.steampowered.com/app/680980/HEADLINER/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/680980/HEADLINER/ 2. Headliner: NoviNews https://store.steampowered.com/app/918820/Headliner_NoviNews/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/918820/Headliner_NoviNews... There is also one by Nicky Case that I've played too: We Become What We Behold - https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb I recommend them all.

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olivermarks 7y ago

'It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled' Making people take push poll style 'tests' and asking them to then believe they are more discerning is really stretching it. The larger issue today is arguably suppressed information, which leads people when they find it to jump to conclusions based on lack of contextual data. Ass in 'official' versions of events that don't make sense and you are feeding a wildfire of paranoia

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dwighttk 7y ago

let me know when this is replicated a few times

germanlee 7y ago

Rather than being an honest game to reduce "disinformation", this game is simply defending mainstream media. It's message is essentially "trust mainstream media". Not that shocking coming from cambridge considering they are at the forefront of cultural war being waged in the west today. How about get opinion/news from a wide variety of sources ( mainstream and fringe, big and small, national and international, right and left, globalist and nationalist, etc )? That's the only reliable way to wade through all the disinformation. Especially regarding controversial, cultural, military, trade and geopolitical issues. If you are getting your "news" from one source then you are getting propaganda and lies. How many wars have we been sold on lies by the media? And yet, we are expected to trust them regardless of their lies. And that's just the most glaring and obvious example. For example, with the recent hong kong protests. It would have been nice to see what the chinese media or asian media were also saying about the issue. I suspect it's a lot different than the "news" we've been seeing about it in the US. If we are interested in the "truth", then it would be nice to see what iranians/iranian media and the media of nearby countries are saying. Rather than just a one sided pro-war "news". But I suspect that neither cambridge nor the media they are protecting truly care about "news, disinformation, fake news, etc".

SantalBlush 7y ago
This is 100% false. It is an "appeal to the middle" fallacy based on two assumptions: 1. that all news sources are equally biased; 2. that aggregating those biases produces an unbiased result. Neither of these assumptions are credible.
- germanlee 7y ago
  1. I didn't say all news sources are "equally biased". Saying all news sources are biased is not the same as saying equally biased. Some are obvious more biased and more propagandistic than others. But without a doubt, every news source has biases. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to look into the history of every news company. Who created them, funded them and who is running them. But I suspect you already know this. 2. I didn't say the "aggregates" produce an unbiased result. I didn't mention anything about "aggregates". Seeing different opinions exposes to you the biases of every news source. If you just watch foxnews or cnn all day, you won't be able to pick up on the bias. But if you watch both, the biases of both become blatantly obvious. I'm not saying watching both somehow magically makes CNN or Foxnews "objective" and "honest". Quite the opposite. 3. Neither of those assumptions are credible because I didn't make them. You made those assumptions in an attempt to defend mainstream media. Which I see all over social media recently. Every comment about being skeptical about media ( especially mainstream media ) gets met with your type of comment. Makes me wonder.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Yeah, they claim this supposed study showed the game increased resistance to fake news, but how do we know that's really true!?

ilaksh 7y ago

The problem with everything related to "fake news" is that it is not in the context of establishment propaganda. Effectively it is an attempt to co-opt the concept of propaganda but with the supposed idea that there is a certain authoritative group that will tell you what's real and always presents just the facts in an impartial way. It's quite amazing. What they have done is to create an enthusiasm for censorship. The net effect is actually the opposite of what it is advertised to be. It enforces top-down information control. In a similar vein, Libra is advertised as a real cryptocurrency that can act as a digital cash. And yet it is actually an attempt to replace real cryptocurrencies with something that can be controlled, easily tracked, and profited from by the companies it was designed to disintermediate.

jrochkind1 7y ago

It makes total sense that the way to learn to spot it, is to practice making it. Analogous to how you can't do defensive IT security unless you understand how people do offensive.

nautilus12 7y ago

Too bad that reality isn't cut and dry enough that you can even define "fake news" unambiguosly, which opens all sides up to enforcing censorship of their particular spin.

uses 7y ago

ITT: "but the real fake news is the lying MSM!", etc.

TomMckenny 7y ago
The revelation that misinformation campaigns catering to preconceptions are not actually reality based is an existential threat to extremism. Any post showing that will draw them like flies. The other popular response seems to be "the article and game are bogus". Not sure how the two are reconciled of course.

throwaway5752 7y ago

In case anyone has just skipped the article to post here without reading, you can play the game here: https://getbadnews.com/#play https://getbadnews.com/#play It helps to play it to understand what they are trying to accomplish.

nixpulvis 7y ago

The post about how we live in a low trust society (or at least more so due to the internet) is really ringing true. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265155

hirundo 7y ago

It's a shame that now when I see Cambridge as a news source I think of their shabby treatment of Jordan Peterson and Noah Carl and discount it somewhat before reading it ... because there are still many fine scholars there.

aaron695 7y ago

Lol, another game that can help people. They will 'play' it why? I can name the amount of games people will play that are helpful or educational to a topic on my hand (ie The old version of WITWICS and ....... I've actually seen another, but it was in a forced setting) I also doubt the study, but it's a moot point, it's another lets create a "game" to stop "fake news" lingo for more funding from suckers rort.

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

Skepticism should be the default position on every issue. We should be teaching the Socratic Method to our children rather than a "core curriculum" that is designed to program them to become workers in an economic system that is rapidly crumbling and will no longer exist in a short period of time. Teaching people how to think is far more important than any specific piece of information. The problem those in government and the upper echelon of society has in this regard is that they want it both ways. They want a population that uncritically accepts government propaganda, but rejects "fake news" (propaganda and disinformation from other, non-governmental sources). Since the creation of the public school system, people have been conditioned to uncritically accept information (which wasn't a problem for the government when there were only 3 television channels that all broadcast permutations of the same government-approved message). With the explosion of the internet and social media, the government has lost control of the narrative, with a population conditioned to uncritically accept information being blasted by a variety of actors from a multitude of sources. The election of carnival barker Donald Trump (and the rejection of Hillary Clinton, universally backed by the entire establishment) was the ultimate warning bell. Those at the top are desperate to regain control of the narrative (rather than teaching people how to think, which would also preclude government propaganda from being effective). This is why we see such an avalanche of censorship, information control and an attack on free speech (on Wikileaks and beyond) coming from government officials and their allies in big tech.

emilfihlman 7y ago

>buy twitter bots I was pretty disappointed the game was "you'll lose if you do the stupid thing!!11!". Bots are not that good and are rather visible as bullshit.

alexmlamb 7y ago

Why don't mainstream newspapers (like NYTimes, Economist, etc) include a list of citations at the end of articles the way that scientific papers do? It seems like this would be easy to do, and would help to restore a lot of trust, because people could easily see if they like the sources being referenced and if the sources are actually fairly represented in the article.

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fuckingGAYYYY 7y ago

What a load of shit. It's a fucking choose your own adventure, and you can yes it to death without reading a word. The game does nothing.

fuckingGAYYYY 7y ago

NO U

tictoc 7y ago

Conspiracy Theories make a lot of assertions and hardly ever provide the proof. They just say it, and move along. If you don't get it, you are an ingrate fool.