by Terry Heick
Want to help students learn to think critically about “fake news”? A simple browser-based game could help.
What is the bad news? Bad news is a simple tool to help students understand “fake news,” the (modern?) phenomenon of misinformation and “content as news” spread, at least in part, by the rise of social and digital media.
(Can download an information sheet about fact for educators.)
As an interactive experience, Bad News helps students understand how fake news works, why it becomes popular, and its core mechanisms and tendencies. It then allows players to choose certain fake news strategies, including emotional appeals, sarcasm, red herrings, personal attacks, and conspiracy theories.
It also introduces the concepts of content forms by allowing players to choose between fake news memes, photoshopped images, or actual “content” (news and articles, etc.), with some strategies (personal attacks) and forms (memes) working better than others depending on the topic of the fake news.
Combine this with us The Cognitive Bias Codex: A Picture of Over 180 Cognitive Biases and you might have the beginnings of an online crash course in critical thinking.
Playing bad news: strengths and weaknesses
While I highly recommend the game as a teaching tool, I gave Bad News a couple of plays and found a few areas where the experience could be improved; First, the “rating” mechanic that asks users to rate the trustworthiness of certain social media posts.
While it makes sense in concept, in practice it is not clear exactly what the trustworthiness of the post is being evaluated: the social media post, the user who shared the post, or the framing of the post’s content.
It’s also not intended to be a full simulation of learning about fake news, so it’s quite limited in terms of what you can actually do from a mechanical standpoint, which limits some of the usefulness and can make it feel a bit like a prolonged finger-wagging on social media use in general.
That said, when the game is at its best, letting you choose from egregious misinformation tactics to gain “credibility,” it’s hard not to shake your head in disbelief at how little critical thinking we practice on a daily basis in our lives. And fake news and social media may be just a microcosm.
The game is simple enough that you don’t need instructions, and if players make a mistake, it’s short enough to start over. As a kind of simulation, remember Plague, Inc.., a sentiment reinforced by the Bad News developers’ stated mission to ‘vaccinate the world against misinformation.’
If you want to introduce students to the idea of fake news and the tactics used by media editors to change users’ perceptions of the news (and, in turn, reality itself), this is a brilliant little tool to start with.
