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.

Comments

Soooo ...

[c6gunner]

They reinvented twitter?

Re:Soooo ...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

With learning feedback, improving your disinformation skills. What could possibly go wrong?

The people playing this game...

[StevenMaurer]

...aren't the ones who need "vaccination".

Re:People are too stupid

[Gravis Zero]

People are simply too stupid. The human species developed technology without wisdom, and killed itself. It's all over.

It's not over yet. Those who manage to survive will learn from our mistakes. Humanity is the ultimate weed: killing all of us is quite a task. Just to hedge our bets, hopefully, Mars colonization and terraforming will take off in this century.

Re: People are too stupid

[Falos]

"If you're not reading news, you're uninformed.
If you're reading news, you're misinformed."

I assume the message is to make your own determinations from aggregate data, to not simply parrot like a mental human centipede.

Ironically, a Retweet does exactly that.

Monopoly was created like this, and failed

[aberglas]

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.

Re:Monopoly was created like this, and failed

[DNS-and-BIND]

No, it is a reaction to the mainstream media outright lying. They've been caught so many times it's ridiculous, and here you are parroting the line that it doesn't exist. Glenn Thrush, the former senior staff writer at Politico was exposed by WikiLeaks as he ran an article by Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta prior to publishing. What was his punishment? He was hired by The New York Times as a political correspondent.

Calling fake news fake news is fake news, according to the fake news. Journalists spread fake news all the time, whenever it satisfies their emotional needs and validates their pre-existing political biases. It's very menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are abusing their positions constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public's mind. Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False.

Recently, four big scoops were run by major news organizations â" written by top reporters and presumably churned through layers of scrupulous editing â" that turned out to be completely wrong: Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and others reported that the special counsel's office had subpoenaed Donald Trump's records from Deutsche Bank. They weren't. ABC reported that Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn't. The New York Times ran a story that showed K.T. McFarland had acknowledged collusion. She didn't. Then CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee emails before they were published.

Forget your routine bias, these were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits, and analysts, all of them feeding frenzied expectations about collusion that have now been internalized as indisputable truths by many. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.

If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask, why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes are prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn't there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats?

When all the errors are in the bank's favor, you can be forgiven for thinking there's more at work than sloppy arithmetic.

It was bound to happen

[grasshoppa]

Someone went and actually built a better idiot.

Liberals fact check, Conservatives don't.

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:Liberals fact check, Conservatives don't.

[Maxo-Texas]

Interesting you brought that up. The graphic showing an incredible number of school shootings came thru our political discussion site and was *immediately* fact checked.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DW...

The data behind that graphic was posted within minutes...

https://www.snopes.com/2018/02...

[q]Firearm attacks during school hours: 7 (incidents resulting in injuries or deaths: 5)

22 January: Italy High School, Italy, Texas â" A 16-year-old student opened fire with a semi-automatic handgun in the school cafeteria, wounding another student.

22 January: NET Charter High School, Gentilly, Louisiana â" An unknown person fired shots at students from a vehicle in the school parking lot. One person was injured (though not by gunfire).

23 January: Marshall County High School, Benton, Kentucky â" A 15-year-old student opened fire with a handgun on school grounds, killing two and injuring 17.

25 January: Murphy High School, Mobile, Alabama â" A student fired a handgun into the air during a fight with another student. No injuries were reported.

26 January: Dearborn High School, Dearborn, Michigan â" Shots were fired during a fight in the school parking lot. No injuries were reported.

31 January: Lincoln High School, Philadelphia â" A fight during a basketball game resulted in the shooting death of a 32-year-old man outside the school.

14 February: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Florida â" A 19-year-old former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, killing 17 and injuring 14.

Firearm attacks NOT occurring during school hours: 2 (incidents resulting in injuries or deaths: 2)

20 January: Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina â" A 21-year-old was shot and killed during a fight at a party on school grounds.

5 February: â" Oxon Hill High School, Oxon Hill, Maryland â" A student was shot and injured in the school parking lot during an attempted robbery.

Shots fired during school hours, unknown reason: 2 (no injuries)

10 January: California State University, San Bernardino, California â" Bullets were fired through a window, with no suspects or motive identified.

8 February: Metropolitan High School, New York, NY â" A student fired a gun into the floor of a classroom.

Unintentional gunfire during school hours: 3 (incidents resulting in injuries or deaths: 1)

10 January: Greyson College, Denison, Texas â" A student fired a weapon belonging to an adviser, believing it wasnâ(TM)t loaded. No injuries were reported.

1 February: Salvador B. Castro Middle School, Los Angeles â" A semi-automatic rifle brought to school by a 12-year-old student accidentally went off. Four students were injured.

5 February: Harmony Learning Center, Maplewood, Minnesota â" A third-grader pressed the trigger of a law enforcement officerâ(TM)s handgun. The weapon went off but no one was injured.

Suicide attempts during school hours: 1 (resulting in death)

10 January: Coronado Elementary School, Sierra Vista, Arizona â" A middle school student shot himself in the bathroom of the school and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Stray bullets hitting school buildings during school hours: 1 (no injuries)

4 January: New Start High School, near Seattle â" Bullets fired by an unidentified shooter entered an administrative office. No injuries were reported.

Stray bullets hitting school buildings NOT occurring during school hours: 1 (no injuries)

15 January: Wiley College, Marshall, Texas â" Gunshots fired from a vehicle in the parking lot of a college dorm entered through a window, but did not injure residents.

Even tho liberals are against guns, more are for factual data.

Re:... says guy with no evidence who writes fake n

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:People are too stupid

[gnick]

...The white people have a low birth rate and the immigrants have a high one...the religious conservatives have a higher birth rate than secular liberals...The immigrants have larger families and may vote for the left...you've got fast breeding conservative Christians...In Europe the fast breeding religious conservatives are Muslim, and that is an issue.

You seem to be saying that the problem isn't that there aren't enough children, just not the right type of children. I asked why you thought the rate needed to be higher and you responded by describing the breeders.

If both parties are wasted it's much harder to negotiate consent.

Maybe, but I've had drunken sex that I wouldn't trade for the world.