I’m Vaccinating Myself Against Fake News — By Creating It Myself
An Online Game Teaches Players to Stop Spreading Disinformation By Learning How It’s Made
I like to think of myself as astute at distinguishing online fact from fiction. Over the past few years, I’ve learned to recognize dubious news sources on my Facebook feed and conspiracy theorists on Twitter.
But a free online game, the cornerstone of an ongoing psychological study, has bared my susceptibility to fake news — and my mind’s ability to fight it. Through a simulated disinformation campaign, I learned the tactics that trolls and zealots use to sway even the most savvy of social media users. According to the game’s creators, I’m being psychologically vaccinated against the viral deceptions I encounter online.
Bad News is the invention of scientists at Cambridge University, and applies Louis Pasteur’s vaccination principles to immunize us against infectious falsehoods. Vaccinations introduce weakened, harmless versions of pathogens to stimulate the body’s immunity against it. Following that model, Bad News presents people with small doses of disinformation to help them better spot it and avoid sharing it.
“We know fake news spreads like a virus on the Internet,” says Sander van der Linden, whose team at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab designed Bad News. “So we want the vaccine to spread like that, too.”
To gauge the game’s potency, players are asked to rate the reliability of a series of real and fake headlines and tweets before and after playing the game. In a recently published study involving more than 14,000 players, they reported that participants’ trust in the fake information fell by an average of 21% after completing the game, regardless of age, education, gender and political persuasion. Those who were most susceptible to the falsehoods before playing the game benefited most from the “inoculation.” Yet their perceptions of the real news remain unchanged after playing the game.
Van der Linden and his colleague and co-author Jon Roozenbeek acknowledge that the effects are moderate, but stand to be substantial when scaled across thousands of players across the globe. Roughly 1 million people have played the game worldwide, earning badges for impersonation, conspiracy, polarization, discrediting sources, trolling and emotionally provocative content
Start Spreading the News
I spent an afternoon playing Bad News, assuming the role of a fake news tycoon. I agreed to take part in the data collection, providing some basic demographic information and disclosing my political leanings. (The game allow me to create fake news from either the right or left of the political spectrum).
I was then presented with a series of headlines posted on Twitter by various sources, and asked to rate the reliability of each tweet. The Twitter handles included @Reuters, @AP — both established news services — along with @WarrenBuffet99. I rated all three as genuine and highly reliable sources.
But others I immediately dismissed as phony. A Dr. Bill Johnson tweeted that gargling with salt water or lemon juice reduces the risk of infection from coronavirus because of its antiseptic qualities. I’ve been gobbling up enough information about Covid-19 to dismiss this as bogus. A news service called The Daily Chronicle tweeted a filmmaker’s claim that a horrific TV-show inspired a suicide. I rated that false. A site called Rapid Updates (@RapidUpdates) quoted a professor calling right-wing reporting a ‘form of violence’. Much as I loathe Fox News and Breitbart, I’ve never heard of Rapid Updates and the headline seemed too hyperbolic to believe. @QuadMedia spewed some snark at Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio over climate change, and @LiveNewsNow touted its expose on the shadow ‘elite’ controlling the world. I rated both as unreliable.
Time to play the game. Bad News first invited me to either fake an official Twitter account or impersonate someone important. I opted for the false identity. I immediately was given the choice of three fake accounts — I got the chance to impersonate President Trump, NASA or the cable network Nickelodeon, with Twitter handles surreptitiously tweaked to look genuine. Donald J. Trump: 45th President of the United States tweeted the president’s decision to declare war on North Korea. (I’ve seen enough news coverage about Trump’s tweets to know his actual Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump. @NÄSA (notice the umlaut) warned of a meteorite headed toward Earth, and Nickelodeøn (notice the slash across the o) announced its decision to cancel SpongeBob Squarepants. I chose the Trump declaration. This boosted my follower count to a paltry 61.
Next, I started a fake news website, with a choice of suggested titles. I chose The Cosmos Post as my moniker, assuming the role of Editor-in-Chief and adding the slogan What They Don’t Want You To Read. This formed the basis of my fake news empire and earned me 105 new followers.
Time to earn my Impersonation badge. I opted to push out emotional content over serious information, and exploit people’s anger rather than fear. I tweeted a fabricated headline that labeled climate-change scientists as stupid, and their claims as fake news. My count of followers climbed to 347, boosted in part by retweets of my post
Over the course of the round, The Cosmos Post tweeted headlines and memes exposing supposed government bribery scandals, anti-aircraft guns being tested on innocent puppies and nuclear waste in Vitamin C pills. I used Twitter bots to capture thousands of extra followers from a fake headline. I found that it’s easy to lose your credibility — a headline about a conspiracy to lace juice boxes with LSD lost me dozens and dozens of fans.
But I more than regained my follower count by avoiding the overtly outlandish. I accused the World Health Organization of ignoring accusations that Covid-19 was manufactured as a bioweapon, and that coronavirus tests cause nerve damage. I attacked a fact-checking site that refuted my claims with a headline accusing the organization of tax evasion.
As I played on, I spread a conspiracy about the cause of a plane crash that ultimately resulted in the airline’s CEO resigning under fire. I Photoshopped pictures. And with the help of Twitter bots, I swiftly boosted my follower base above 8,000.
After I finished my first round, I was presented again with experimental tweets I rated before starting the game, to see what I’ve learned. My responses were the same, but some subsequent searches on Twitter showed me my intuition, while good, isn’t foolproof. The @WarrenBuffett99 account that I rated as completely credible is not the investor’s Twitter handle at all, but rather a fan page with only 44 followers and a mere 30 tweets in total.
But my game-play earned me badges for impersonation, exploiting emotions, trolling, fueling polarization, inventing conspiracies, and discrediting foes. I learned how fake-news hawkers capitalize on people’s tendency to overlook news sources when reading headlines on social media. And I learned waging a smear campaign against my critics helps restore any credibility I lose. But most importantly, I learned how tweaking a legitimate brand name or Twitter handle can make a fabricated source appear authentic.
Scaling the Vaccine
The findings from the Bad News experiment has drawn widespread interest as a remedy for the violence, voter manipulation, and health threats that fake news has spawned. With the help of the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office, the team has translated the game into German, Greek, Polish and several other languages. WhatsApp has tapped the researchers to create a new game for its messaging platform. Van der Linden and Roozenbeek have presented their findings to United Nations Institute for Training and Research, which is interested in testing the “vaccination” approach to neutralize the propaganda tactics that violent extremists use to recruit disaffected youth and other vulnerable targets. And the researchers plan to adapt the game to counter anti-vaccination crusades — a version that will become especially crucial in the coming year or two.
“My anticipation is when a [Covid-19] vaccine is ready, there will be a host of fake news coming out about it,” van der Linden to me. “So now would be the time to pre-empt that.”
But this vaccination approach faces some challenges. Its current iteration includes fake text and Photoshopped images. But altered video and audio, aka deep fakes, are growing increasingly sophisticated and staying a step or two ahead of the algorithms designed to detect them. And studies show that we’re easily duped by doctored multimedia.
Then there’s the matter of false advertising and political lies, which are staples of modern societies but have escalated to new heights with the rise of populism, autocracy and amoral capitalism. Over the last decade, companies like Facebook, Volkswagen, and Wells Fargo have lied to consumers and regulators, all with dire consequences to our privacy, our safety, and our livelihoods. And our own president is hopelessly divorced from truth. Can science develop a vaccine against the falsehoods we get from official sources?
