Study Shows High School Students Improve in Identifying Fake News After Playing ‘Bad News’ Game

When high school students get to try to spread fake information in a game, they get better at identifying fake news in real life. This is shown by a study in which the game “Bad news” was scientifically proven.

– He is very happy that it really works. We need better ways to identify false information and this seems to be fruitful, says Thomas Nygren who is professor of didactics at Uppsala University and one of the authors of the study.

Hard to find deepfake

For many years, he has been teaching and researching original criticism. Since it is easy to build a so-called deep picture, where the sender pretends to be someone else, we must, according to him, learn to find manipulation tricks instead.

– Those who spread false and misleading messages have a few things in common, such as playing on our emotions and creating polarization. By recognizing these, we get better at finding out which messages are fake, says Thomas Nygren.

Together with three other researchers, he conducted a study in which 516 Swedish high school students from four schools on different programs participated. The students first had to do a test where they had to identify which news stories were true and which were false. Then they got to play the game, individually, in pairs or the whole class together.

Play on emotions

The game is open for testing bad news game.se including using different tricks to get a lot of followers. The more followers you get, the higher your score. The player can choose between, for example, creating fabricated headlines, buying followers or writing emotionally appealing posts.

After playing, the students took another test. Then they were much better at showing their disinformation than before. The result was published in the journal Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

– The students developed the ability to identify manipulation methods in social media posts and to differentiate between reliable and fake news, says Thomas Nygren.