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The best medicine against online disinformation is an informed society that's thinking critically. The problem is there are no shortcuts to universal education.
Enter Finnish Public Broadcasting Company, Yle, which is hoping to harness the engagement power of gamification to accelerate awareness and understanding of troll tactics and help more people spot malicious internet fakes. It has put together an online game, called Troll Factory, that lets you play at being, well, a hateful troll. Literally.
The game begins with a trigger warning that it uses "authentic social media content" that viewers may find disturbing. If you continue to play you'll see examples of Islamophobic slogans and memes that have actually been spread on social media. So the trigger warning is definitely merited.
The game itself takes the form of a messaging app style conversation on a virtual smartphone in which you are tasked by the troll factory boss to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment. You do this by making choices about which messages to post online and the methods used to amplify distribution.
Online disinformation tactics intended to polarize public discourse which are depicted in the game include the seeding of conspiracy theory memes on social media; the exploitation of real news events to spread fake claims; microtargeting of hateful content at different demographics and platforms; and the use of paid bots to amplify propaganda so that hateful views appear more widely held than they really are.
After completing an inaugural week's work in the troll factory, the game displays a rating and shows how many shares and follows your dis-ops garnered. This is followed by contextual information on the influencing methods demonstrated — putting the activity you've just participated in into wider context.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/13/this-game-uses-troll-tactics-to-teach-critical-thinking/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday September 15 2019, @08:55AM (1 child)
I think they need to flip this around for better results, with only this side of it you are training kids how to actually be disinformation agents.
What they need help with is how to have a civilian society and effective work groups to get things done and affect change where needed.
How to hold a consensus when the united states military (and pick 5 others) do not want anyone to have a consensus about this topic?
Consider this scenario(and I hope the devels see this):
A class of 30 must decide on whether or not to give aid to a foreign country whose government is actively using propaganda on them to make it difficult to get the actual facts.
The students must
-decide which media sources are not owned and operated by people from this country
-decide which of 100 messages targetted to them individually are true, and each student gets a different set of personalized propaganda
-decide who was the aggressor or manipulator in 10 events in that region
-decide which person in their class is an actual former member of this countries spy agency while this person actively tries to make everyone in the class start a race war with each other over unrelated issues
THAT is what needs to be taught, but don't expect that to come from the institutions that are trying to make it impossible for 5 people to have an unsupervised, unrecorded meeting.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 15 2019, @01:56PM
"Consensus" is one of those gay terms that real people don't use. "Consensus" is nothing more than a dogwhistle for liberals.