By Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden
The term fake news is everywhere these days. After gaining steam during the 2016 US election, its become a catch-all phrase used by people from across the political spectrum. Yet fake stories or stories that have been entirely made up have been around since the dawn of man. And on top of that, stories dont have to be completely fake to be misleading. Terms such as propaganda, disinformation, misinformation and post-truth are used by many people, as though they mean the same thing.
In practice, most people are concerned about disinformation: that is, misinformation coupled with the intent to deceive. Today, its easier than ever to mislead people. In the online world, posing as a credible news producer requires a bit of money and dedication but its not hard.
Meanwhile, peoples trust in the media is declining, and a majority of Americans say that fake news has left them confused about basic facts. Add to that the growing problem of computational propaganda where Twitter bots or other social media tools amplify certain hashtags or messages to influence whats trending and the current landscape becomes very difficult for people to navigate.
Fighting back
There are many ways companies and governments are trying to combat this growing threat. Google and Facebook are tweaking their algorithms to stop promoting fake news. France is in the process of passing a controversial fake news law, which limits media activity during election time. And the UK government has announced its setting up an anti-fake news unit. Yet each of these efforts comes with its own problems.
From our perspective, as researchers studying the fake news phenomenon, we think the best way to fight the bad effects is at the individual level. So, were experimenting by combining psychology with technology in a new area of research, which some scholars are calling technocognition.
So far, one of us found that its possible to inoculate people against misinformation by warning and exposing them to a weakened version of the real misleading argument, and then revealing to them why its misleading. In other words, a small dose of fake news can inoculate you against it just like a real vaccination would protect you against a disease.
Tricks of the trade
There are many reasons why people produce disinformation: they can be financial, political, personal and even just for fun. But the techniques that are being used to mislead people are remarkably similar across the board.
One of the simplest is impersonation: imitating a public figure or organisation with the intent of misleading the public. They might also create emotional content, which deliberately plays on peoples basic emotions such as fear or anger to get a response. Next, theres polarisation when fake news merchants stir up existing political tensions, to drive people further apart.
Then there are conspiracies: misleading theories, which often hold a large organisation responsible for some kind of covert agenda like saying NASA faked the moon landing to win the space race. Then, people whose credibility is under attack will often try to discredit their opponents by engaging in whataboutism or personal attacks. And lastly we have trolling, which involves disrupting discussions and provoking reactions from people, combining all of the techniques mentioned above.
Good news, bad news
When people use these techniques themselves, it really improves their ability to recognise them in other contexts. So, together with DROG (a Dutch organisation working against the spread of disinformation), we developed an online game called Bad News (click here to play it), where players use misleading tactics to build their own fake news empire.
The game is free to play in any browser and on any device and takes about 15 minutes to complete. You start as an anonymous Twitter user who goes professional by starting their own news site, and gradually becomes a fake news tycoon. On the way, you earn badges and learn how the techniques mentioned earlier can be used to suit your purposes.
We figured that once you know how the magic trick works, you wont be fooled by it again. So we put our ideas to the test by doing a pilot study in a high school in the Netherlands. Some classes were assigned to the treatment group and played our game. Others were assigned to the control group, and didnt play the game.
Although our study was only a starting point, the results so far have been positive: students who played the game thought the fake news articles they read afterwards were less reliable. We hope that our game will play a role in stopping the spread of misleading information: just as misinformation replicates, vaccines can spread, too. The more people that play the game, the further the vaccine spreads until one day, we may achieve societal resistance against fake news.
This article has been previously published on The Conversation.
Featured image courtesy: Unsplash