Vaccinating people against fake news

The idea of turning fake-news inoculation into something fun was conceived in 2016 at a bar in the Netherlands. Over beers with friends, Roozenbeek batted around the possibility of using a game to combat false information online. He created a prototype, which he called Bad News. As he researched the idea further, Roozenbeek came across Van der Linden’s studies, and the two agreed to work together on more advanced online inoculation games. Their collaboration expanded on Bad News, then added Harmony Square, which is now freely available at harmonysquare.game.

In tongue-in-cheek fashion, the games introduce players to a host of common fake-news tactics. As I type a fake headline about a local politician in Harmony Square, my boss stresses the importance of stoking people’s fear with inflammatory language. “You missed some. Do better,” she scolds when I don’t include enough incendiary words like “corrupt” or “lie” in my headline. “Remember: Use words that upset people.” The game also goads me to create a website that claims to be a legitimate news outlet, sucking people in by projecting the appearance of credibility.

The argument against these dishonest tactics is embedded in the game play. The more disinformation you spread, the more unrest you sow in the fictional town of Harmony Square. By the end of the game, normally placid townspeople are screaming at one another. As I play, I get caught up in the narrative of how fake-news tactics undermine community from within.

To evaluate whether the games are truly effective, Roozenbeek and Van der Linden surveyed about 14,000 people before and after they played Bad News. After playing the game to the end, people were better overall at spotting falsehoods, rating the reliability of fake tweets and news reports about 20 percent lower than they had before. The effects lasted for more than two months. These results are in line with those of other anti-disinformation tactics such as correcting or fact-checking suspect content, according to a meta-analysis of such interventions by researchers from the University of Southern California.

Social scientists see promise in the Cambridge team’s efforts to inoculate people against fake news. “Walking in the perpetrators’ shoes, so to speak, can be very effective for understanding how disinformation can be produced and some reasons why,” says Robert Futrell, a sociologist and extremism researcher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, although he has not reviewed specific data from Bad News or Harmony Square.

Even if they work well, games alone will not be enough to inoculate whole populations against online disinformation. Several million people have played the Cambridge team’s offerings so far, according to Roozenbeek, a tiny fraction of the global population. Daniel Jolley, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham, notes that large-scale inoculation will have to be implemented in a wide range of settings, from classrooms to community centers. Ideally, such programs should reach students during their school years, before they have been extensively exposed to fake news, Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg has argued.

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