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Researchers Develop Online Game That Teaches Players How To Spread Misinformation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Cambridge researchers have built an online game, simply titled Bad News, in which players compete to become "a disinformation and fake news tycoon." By shedding light on the shady practices, they hope the game will "vaccinate" the public, and make people immune to the spread of untruths. Players of the fake news game must amass virtual Twitter followers by distorting the truth, planting falsehoods, dividing the united, and deflecting attention when rumbled. All the while, they must maintain credibility in the eyes of their audience. The game distills the art of undermining the truth into six key strategies. Once a player has demonstrated a knack for each, they are rewarded with a badge. In one round, players can opt to impersonate the president of the United States and fire off a tweet from a fake account. It declares war on North Korea complete with a #KimJongDone hashtag. At every step, players are asked if they are happy with their actions or feel, perhaps, the twinge of shame, an emotion that leads to the swift reminder that "if you want to become a master of disinformation, you've got to lose the goody two-shoes attitude." The work is due to be published in the Journal of Risk Research.
People are simply too stupid. The human species developed technology without wisdom, and killed itself. It's all over.
I don't respond to AC's.
Seems like what is happening for real on all the mainstream media channels.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
By shedding light on the shady practices, they hope the game will "vaccinate" the public, and make people immune to the spread of untruths.
Did they learn nothing from the Monopoly game?
Fast forward to 2040-- "New! Cheaters edition of Bad News!"
*facepalm*
They reinvented twitter?
... fake news. Something something complete.
...aren't the ones who need "vaccination".
And them crooks ... ARE ... GOING ... DOWWWWWWWN!!
This is just getting started! Roll OVER Baytoevun!!
So, it's a politics simulator then?
The game is called EvE Online
If it is good enough for economic modelling, it sure is good enough for modelling "Fake News"
for infringing on their business model and trade secrets.
Players of the fake news game must amass virtual Twitter followers by distorting the truth, planting falsehoods, dividing the united, and deflecting attention when rumbled. All the while, they must maintain credibility in the eyes of their audience. The game distills the art of undermining the truth into six key strategies. Once a player has demonstrated a knack for each, they are rewarded with a badge.
This game is a shameless ripoff, I already got my badge a year ago.
In one round, players can opt to impersonate the president of the United States and fire off a tweet from a fake account. It declares war on North Korea complete with a #KimJongDone hashtag.
I just one-upped your game by hacking the real account and sending it from there, oddly enough the combination is the same as on my luggage.
At every step, players are asked if they are happy with their actions or feel, perhaps, the twinge of shame
That's strange, my game kept insisting that "the only way to win is not to play", that's a silly game. Game on!
By shedding light on the shady practices, they hope the game will "vaccinate" the public, and make people immune to the spread of untruths.
Mission accomplished, I see so many untruths written about my presidency and I don't believe any of it, it's all fake news.
(this review may not actually be written by Donald Trump... or is it? #fakenews #realnews #whocantellthesedays)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
God, you're so boring.
Gamers already know how to manipulate people, that's what multiplayer gaming is all about.
The premise here is that by doing something in a video game you'll be vaccinated against doing it. OMG. So all we need to do is have our children playing video games with as much raping, murdering, terrorism, bullying, and every other bad thing you can think of as possible and they'll all be vaccinated and the world will be as one. Why didn't we think of this sooner? It's so perfect!!! And I guess the more realistic we make it the better, right?
The original game was created by anti-monopolist Elizabeth Magie to awaken people to the danger of uncontrolled capitalism -- in the game money always goes to money. But the effect was exactly the opposite, it encouraged capitalistic thinking.
This game should be called "the Joy of Fake News".
Incidentally, I wish the SJWs would never have coined the term, and would stop using it. Trump et. al. has done an excellent job of turning it around to mean anything they disagree with.
Someone went and actually built a better idiot.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Wow, if the kids could only practice long enough, they might become half as good at it as the mass media and U.S. government itself!
I mean, how else are you going to cover up the pedophilia of your leading ranks and convince the public to risk vaccinating their own children, for nothing?
Indoctrinate yourselves while you still can!
you poof
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/p...
Horner was known for writing false stories and disseminating internet hoaxes that often went viral on Facebook and hoodwinked thousands of people.
They included a story falsely claiming former President Obama was gay and a radical Muslim, and another saying protesters were being paid thousands of dollars to demonstrate at Donald Trump's campaign rallies.
Horner took on greater prominence during the presidential election when false stories were widely shared on social media during the race between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
In an interview with The Washington Post in 2016, Horner said he thought Trump won the White House because of him. Horner said Trump's supporters didn't fact-check his stories before posting them. ...
The fake news mill over seas said the same thing. Liberals fact checked stories so the stories couldn't get traction. So after a short time, all their stories were targeted at convervatives.
Like Mulder, conservatives wanted to believe.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's amazing you draw the conclusion you want from the statements of a guy who admits to having made fake news without bothering to get any sort of corroboration at all and cite that as proof. Shouldn't you, I dunno, fact check that by seeking actual data, rather than things someone said on the internet?
Or was this post a test to see if we're actually paying attention? If so, you're a genius for putting it in such an ironic format.
OK, I see right through this, CNN and MSNBC are teaming up to get a little free training for their next generation of muckrakers, race-baiters, and conspiracy theorist they call "anchors"
The story I was mentioning above.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1...
TBILISI, Georgia â" Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from Americaâ(TM)s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.
âoeI donâ(TM)t know why, but it did not work,â said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real â" and completely fake â" news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.
More than 6,000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar observation. Mr. Eganâ(TM)s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a âoegold mine.â His traffic soared and his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites.
âoeItâ(TM)s all Trump,â Mr. Egan said by telephone. âoePeople go nuts for it.â
If his pro-Clinton site had taken off, he said, he would have pressed on with that, but âoepeople did not engage,â so he focused on serving pro-Trump supporters instead. They, he quickly realized, were a far more receptive audience âoebecause they are angryâ and eager to read outrageous tales.
âoeFor me, this is all about income, nothing more,â he added.
---
So yup, conservatives and republicans went crazy reading fake pro-trump, anti clinton stories written by this guy's staff of writers. Unlike the 13 Russians just indicted, Beqa didn't even care politically. He was just trying to drive ad hits.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Noone does misinformation and fake News like CNN.
See how that works. Take your ideological trolling elsewhere. Enjoy your Washington post polling data - Hillary had a "98% chance of winning".
Forgive me if I conclude that your dubious liberal media studies are disinformation. because well they are.
The ultimate in fake news, fear uncertainty and doubt.
Until you get capitalism to stop recognizing Bullshit Click-Bait Artist as a valid job skill for any "news" agency, this little game of yours is nothing more than job training for a lucrative future career. Teaching kids to maintain credibility by lying, with a POTUS bonus round to try and incite a war against another country? What's next, Pipe Bombs in the Kitchen with Barney the Dinosaur? The sick irony of teaching violence as we have a nation marching against it right now.
And no, you aren't going to "teach" the masses with this crap. They are blissfully ignorant, and rather enjoy it. You are going to create a new generation of con artists though. Congratulations. I'm sure that'll end well.
probably cheated tho.
Research paid for by Hillary...
How the heck does crap like this get modded "Insightful"?
I assume players with the highest scores will be offered jobs at CNN, MSNBC, and the like.
Profit model will just end up being:
"Create app about trolling,
have millions use app,
use data from app to sell to troll farms/governments,
becomes research as to perfecting trolling"
This is some real Bernays / 1984 crap going on.
How to use Rules for Radicals effectively.
At least in 1984 it's only the Two Minutes Hate. Don't you people ever get tired of this stuff?
I've seen some sore losers in my life, but you are the sorest. Give ... it ... a ... rest.
You lost because you sucked. Nobody cared about this "fake news", because there was more than enough real news that was highly unfavorable to you, despite the fervent loyalty (to you) of the news readers.
BTW, if you really think these 8o Russians and their tiny Facebook ad buy decided the election, then I highly recommend that you hire them. They are the most amazing marketers ever.
So it's a game about a fictitious social media site full of memes... you don't need a game for that...
We'll make great pets
A game about spreading miss information? Where do I sign up?
#DeleteFacebook
Great, so you cited a news story that says that some people who admit to writing fake news claim--without providing evidence--that conservatives don't fact check. You do realize that "evidence" means more than "I found a 'news' article that agrees with me!" right? The information provided in the article is literally only the say-so of some people who claim to write fake news.
I couldn't find a more ironic way to lampshade that if I tried.
But no, everyone is vulnerable to fake news. People don't bother considering the sources of information and whether we can believe a "sources say" rumor with no corroborating facts. People don't bother separating the opinions from the facts or figuring out how well the facts support that opinion. They don't bother to notice that some "journalists" are partisan hacks with an axe to grind--except when they disagree with them. In that case, we instead get lazy and stop reading instead of seeing if they have a point this time.
The ironic thing is that the people who believe they are invulnerable are the most vulnerable. I know I'm vulnerable. I read all sorts of things to see what the other side isn't telling me. I look for facts and corroborated evidence and original sources. I ignore opinions almost entirely. I read plenty of fake news, but I don't believe it. And quite a lot of it has been on CNN or the WaPo, not just Fox or InfoWars.
I got shitloads of misinformation shoved down my throat in school, mostly in "history" classes.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Thank Dingy Harry for that one. Of course Saul Alinsky gets some credit as well.
See subject & Hahahaha @ arseholetechnica BLUNDERERS busted for lies https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11776235&cid=56164223/
* Couldn't happen to a worse bunch of fucks spreading LIES about a program that was LONG AGO patched saying it wasn't libeling the programmers & company (& ars tried it on me & had their ASSES handed to them)...
APK
P.S.=> They're the WORST of the lot & blundering wannabes... apk
Absolutely no bias in that game at all. Perhaps the creators should also have a path for setting up a complete fake news network. They could call it CFN, and your job is too spread misinformation all the time.
How about adding a class for all K-12 to teach/learn/discuss all kinds of Logical Fallacies?
How many high school graduates have a full understanding of logical fallacies?
Even if any student seems to understand a particular logical fallacy, can that student really identify the same fallacy, under different disguises?
A good understanding of all kinds of logical fallacies is extremely important for our "social media" age (for people of all ages)!
Wrong, illogical thinking, even manipulation attempts (using hard to detect logical fallacies) everywhere on the internet!
Yes, internet kills monopoly for information. If you kill freedom of speech in internet in USA then people will VPN to censorship free country. You will not stop internet. You will only create problems for Home Land Security to track users activity over internet.
Stop that crappy way and start working on your own ideas to win back public opinion globally.
This game is revealing private trade practices which give competitive advantage to MSM. Is noone suing them?
**Life is too short to be serious**
Disclaimer: I run a conservative leaning fake news site that makes well over $15k a month in crypto mining and ad revenue. I donate roughly $10k a month to local antifa groups around the country. I have a heavily decentralized network of authors that get paid handsomely writing for my sites.
As much as reality hurts to acknowledge, the right is deeply mired in fiction. I too tried to play on the liberals, but I received the same treatment; on social media the stories fall apart and nobody clicks on them. Conservatives though have shared my articles over a billion times. I've even had complete bullshit I made up out of nowhere make it to Breitbart front page and Fox News. It's uncanny how manipulatable right wingers are if you touch them just right in the emotions.
At least the money I earn goes to good causes though to continue to battle the easily manipulated, and I have a plan in place near 2018 election time to discredit a lot of conservative congressfolk in an effort to turn some votes around. With the reach I have on just one website I can probably flip some counties :)
he's not dead. but his acting career is.
Indeed. And ever since conservative think tanks have thrown billions of dollars at rewriting history to be more favorable to them (at least in the US), it's gotten considerably worse. Luckily my kids all have copies of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky books, so that they can be reminded of the history the right doesn't want them to know about, that the entire rest of the world is particularly aware of.
All the top players will receive employment offers from the Banana Republicans!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sure, they tend to report some stories more than others. They focus on hype rather than substance. And they editorialize against Trump. But they do not blatantly lie. Saying that you report opinion polls which look like Trump will lose is not lying, even if they turn out to be wrong.
Fake news, on the other hand, is blatant lies. Initially most of it came out of a town in Macedonia(!) as a way to make money from click through ads. The perpetrators were not political, just after the money. They tried both left and right wing bullshit, but found that only the right wing would swallow it. And made good money from them.
There effectiveness encouraged more on the right to realize that truth really does not matter in the political debate and also became more blatant in their hyperbole.
But if you will be very hard pressed to find any actual lying in the mainstream media.
True, false?
No clue since it ias an AC who I'm promoting to visible level....
"Disclaimer: I run a conservative leaning fake news site that makes well over $15k a month in crypto mining and ad revenue. I donate roughly $10k a month to local antifa groups around the country. I have a heavily decentralized network of authors that get paid handsomely writing for my sites.
As much as reality hurts to acknowledge, the right is deeply mired in fiction. I too tried to play on the liberals, but I received the same treatment; on social media the stories fall apart and nobody clicks on them. Conservatives though have shared my articles over a billion times. I've even had complete bullshit I made up out of nowhere make it to Breitbart front page and Fox News. It's uncanny how manipulatable right wingers are if you touch them just right in the emotions.
At least the money I earn goes to good causes though to continue to battle the easily manipulated, and I have a plan in place near 2018 election time to discredit a lot of conservative congressfolk in an effort to turn some votes around. With the reach I have on just one website I can probably flip some counties :)"
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.