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Friday, 23 February 2018

FAKE NEWS IS STILL WITH US IN 2018 BUT WITH A VIDEO GAME

The online game Bad News lets you build your own fake-news empire.Fake news is still with us in 2018, manipulating our social feeds and minds with blatant appeals to partisanship and emotion.

The media hasn't solved it. Facebook and Twitter haven't eliminated it. The government hasn't fixed it.








Where all of these huge organizations have failed, the game Bad News wants to succeed.Bad News is a browser-based game built to "vaccinate" people against disinformation on social media by placing them in the driver's seat of its distribution. Built by a team of researchers, journalists and academics, the game tasks you with building a fake news empire while avoiding those pesky people complaining about "facts" and "truth."

Bad News is a Twine-style game designed by members of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and media literacy group Drog. Its goal is to teach players about digital misinformation by turning them into purveyors of it. You’ll start with a small-time Twitter account and slowly build followers by feeding their appetite for fear and anger, while deflecting fact-checkers’ criticism and muddling straightforward issues with minimally plausible conspiracy theories.

You win Bad News by destroying the quality of online discourse for your own gain. You lose by acknowledging nuance, tipping too far into fantasy, or fighting with the game’s snarky narrator. It’s reminiscent of The Westport Independent, a game about running a newspaper in a totalitarian state, except that there’s no ideological justification here — just the endless quest for clicks and eyeballs.


The game works at different levels, involving both bizarre made-up conspiracy theories - one being the claim that dinosaurs built the pyramids - and misinformation with a genuine history.
SOURCES:
https://goo.gl/8eYUzc

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