RumorGuard is a news/information service provided by News Literacy Project. In addition to a feed of recent events that explains why and/or how they’re misinformative (whether that be through AI-generated images and video or more old-school techniques like straight up lying), it also contains tools and tips for spotting misinformation, with PDFs and video lessons. There’s also a simple set of ‘how you can help’ areas, with donations and asks for assistance.
It’s pretty comprehensive, even if the site itself admits that it’s a beta. It explains and gives tools for how to spot it on your own, while consistenly providing a good stream of fact checking for those who want examples or just a deeper dive than what they’re personally capable of. I think this is a good resource to send someone who’s on the fence about certain topics. It is fundamentally, however, just a basic database with some reading and videos to help explain what’s going on. It’s not really interactive in any way other than simply being a website, unlike the other half of what I went over today.
Bad News (or getbadnews.com) meanwhile plays more like a game, a short visual novel walking you through the process of how a single person or a small team can create polarizing drama and sensational nonsense, with a final score to evaluate how good you were at picking the ‘right’ options represented by Twitter followers (or, X now. Someone should update that.). The interactive element does make it more compelling than RumorGuard: We like to play games! It’s literally in our genetics, if you read the homo ludens theory. But it also makes it more effective as a teaching tool: playing with material hands on like this creates a stronger memory than simply being told about how something works. Muscle memory is more effective than regular memory, after all.
Which is why I think an interactive experience is much better for illustrating the points provided about how something works. By giving you a hands-on experience with the material-making fake news and giving you concrete feedback in terms of what works and what doesn’t, it allows for more solid feedback that sticks in your mind in a way that reading or listening, slightly more ‘passive’ experiences compared to doing, doesn’t. I would still recommend RumorGuard because it has ongoing coverage of actual news stories that you can check if you yourself are unsure. Giving someone the tools to do something is good, but it never hurts to be able to double check a reliable source to make absolutely sure that something is real or false. But overall, games like Bad News are something I would highly recommend to teenagers learning about misinformation for the first time, to help them understand what in the world is just being used to make them angry or scared, and to give thm the tools to understand and counteract mis- and dis-information in their lives.
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