New Study Finds Gaming Against Disinformation Helps Students Spot Fake News

A new study has found that a computer game where players take on the role of the bad guys can help students better identify disinformation techniques. The game, called Bad News, was developed through a collaboration between researchers from the University of Cambridge and video game studios to help students spot fake news.

The study involved 516 Swedish upper secondary school students from four different institutions. In Bad News, players play the role of "fake news-monger," exposing them to six common misinformation practices: impersonation, emotion, polarization, conspiracy, discrediting, and trolling.

“This is an important step towards equipping young people with the tools they need to navigate in a world full of disinformation,” Thomas Nygren, a professor of education at Uppsala University in Sweden and one of the study authors, said in a statement.

He added:

“We all need to become better at identifying manipulative strategies since it is virtually impossible to discern deep fakes, for example, and other AI-generated disinformation with the naked eye.”

The team published their study in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. Students played the game either individually, in pairs, or with their class using a shared scorecard, and all three approaches showed positive outcomes.

Nygren said that the students who participated “improved their ability to identify manipulative techniques in social media posts and to distinguish between reliable and misleading news.”

The success of Bad News adds to the growing interest in serious games—games designed with a specific educational or training purpose. The Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab has also developed two other serious games: Harmony Square, in collaboration with the US Department of Homeland Security, targeting election misinformation, and Go Viral!, which focuses on COVID-19 misinformation.