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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: 2) by theluggage on Sunday September 15 2019, @09:38AM
This seems to be based off another study [cam.ac.uk] which actually claims to have some evidence of effectiveness. You can also play the "game" online.
I think there's a difference between using "gamification" techniques in education and claiming that you're producing games. If you look at the Cambridge example its actually fairly linear - what most of the decisions are doing is keeping you engaged and forcing you to read the text (some of them are "Yay!" vs. "I Rule!" non-choices - but you have to read them to know). The next GTA it is not - but its way more engaging than reading an essay or a "gawp mode" video on fake news techniques.
One problem I see with the Finnish idea is that they are basing it on a "serious" subject on which people may already have strong views. Also, I'd like to think that there's a pretty solid consensus view that, views on the details of immigration policy notwithstanding, knowingly stirring up racism to support your view (which the Finnish game pretty much explicitly asks you to do) is a Bad Thing.
A better exercise might be to ask players to write the fake news for both sides of an argument...
The Cambridge "game" relies on somewhat less sensitive subjects and gives you a bit of choice between vaguely left-ish (evil big corporations!) or right-ish (evil government!) subjects. Their theory makes comparisons to "vaccinations" and "weak doses" whereas the Finnish version seems to work on the basis a measles party... But then I read this tweet that said vaccinations are a plot by alien lizards to restrict human intelligence... [theguardian.com]
Disclaimer: haven't tried the Finnish app, have tried the Cambridge one and, as a result, suddenly realise that everything I ever read about The Blue Oyster Cult was a hoax... :-)