Dangerous Information: A Sport About The ‘Success’ Of Pretend Information

by Terry Heick

Wish to assist college students study to suppose critically about ‘pretend information’? A easy, browser-based sport might assist.

What’s Dangerous Information? Dangerous Information is an easy software to assist college students perceive ‘pretend information,’ the (trendy?) phenomenon of misinformation and ‘content material as information’ propagated, not less than partially, by the rise of digital and social media.

(You possibly can obtain an information sheet about made for educators.)

As an interactive expertise, Dangerous Information helps college students perceive how pretend information works, why it turns into fashionable, and its central mechanics and tendencies. It then permits gamers to decide on sure pretend information methods, together with emotional appeals, sarcasm, pink herrings, private assaults, and conspiracy theories.

It additionally introduces the ideas of content material types by permitting gamers to decide on between pretend information memes, photoshopped pictures, or precise ‘content material’ (information tales and articles, and so on.), with some methods (private assaults) and types (memes) working higher than others relying on the pretend information subject.

Couple this with our The Cognitive Bias Codex: A Visible Of 180+ Cognitive Biases and you may have the beginnings of a crash course in important considering on-line.

Taking part in Dangerous Information: Strengths And Weaknesses

Whereas I extremely advocate the sport as a educating software, I gave Dangerous Information a few play-throughs and bumped into a number of areas the expertise could possibly be improved–before everything, the ‘score’ mechanic that asks customers to price the reliability of sure social media posts.

Whereas it is smart in idea, in apply, it’s unclear precisely what you’re evaluating the reliability of: the social media publish, the consumer who shared the publish, or the framing of the content material within the publish.

It’s additionally not meant to be a full-on learning-about-fake-news simulation, so it’s pretty skinny when it comes to what you’re capable of truly do from a mechanics standpoint–which limits a few of the utility and may go away it feeling a bit like a drawn-out finger wag at social media use usually.

That mentioned, when the sport is at its finest–letting you select between heinous disinformation techniques in an effort to achieve ‘credibility’–it’s laborious to not shake your head in disbelief at how little important considering we apply each day in our lives. And faux information and social media are perhaps only a microcosm.

The sport is straightforward sufficient that you just don’t want directions and if gamers make a mistake, it’s brief sufficient to only begin over. As a form of simulation, it’s harking back to Plague, Inc., a sense strengthened by Dangerous Information builders said mission of ‘vaccinat(ing) the world in opposition to disinformation.”

If you wish to introduce college students to the thought of faux information and the techniques utilized by media publishers to vary consumer’s perceptions about information–and in flip, actuality itself–it’s an excellent little software to get began.