Breaking Harmony Square
Breaking Harmony Square is an online game about creating fake news and trolling people on social media to disrupt the Harmony Square neighborhood. When you begin, you’re hired on the Chief Disinformation Officer and it’s your job to intentionally deceive people.
The goal is to divide the neighborhood using misinformation to stir up drama and escalate conversations into arguments. Not all fake news is political, but this game is focused on fake news that increases tensions among the residents before an upcoming community election.
The game provides players with a variety of fake news posts to choose from, some worse than others. When choosing an option, look closely for words that would upset people the most.
For example, in one part of the game I was asked to choose three words for an article, but the words I selected weren’t upsetting enough to continue.
I was required to try again, this time, using words that would stir up more drama and emotions. This game will make you feel like you have a devil sitting on your shoulder encouraging you to make bad decisions.
The goal is to teach the player how to recognize common fear-mongering buzzwords often used in headlines.
According to the About page on the site’s homepage, the game was designed to act as a psychological “vaccine”, building up a cognitive resistance against online misinformation. The game puts you in the mind of an internet troll, allowing you to see misinformation from an insider view. This change of perspective helps players gain confidence in recognizing misinformation online.
Rumor Guard
Rumor Guard is an education tool created by the News Literacy Project to help advance news literacy. Rumor Guard hosts a collection of misinformation examples from current news topics and breaks down the evidence into fact-checks. The purpose of the site is to help media consumers recognize and debunk the misinformation they come across online.
The most recent fact-check on the website is about the Baltimore Key bridge collapsing. I’m sure you’ve heard at least one conspiracy, like suggesting the accident was connected to the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind for this scene here. This was the first rumor I saw online within a few hours of seeing the news.
We can see in the screenshot below that Rumor Guard debunked this.
So what steps does Rumor Guard take to check its facts?
It takes five factors into consideration: source, evidence, logical reasoning, authenticity, and accuracy of context.
These factors help determine if the rumor is credible or not.
If you scroll down further on each rumor fact-check on the site , you’ll see the exact techniques that were used to debunk them. These are the techniques that were used to find misinformation in the Key Bridge collapse rumors:
My favorite part about Rumor Guard is that it offers free lessons, tutorials, and other learning materials on each of the five factors and the techniques you can use to become news literate.
By utilizing tools like Breaking Harmony Square and Rumor Guard, we can become literate media users. We can utilize the skills we learn from these educational tools to debunk and disprove misinformation and fake news online.
Take the time to try these tools for yourself!
Share this with your family and friends to encourage gaining critical thinking and fact-checking skills so everyone can combat the spread of misinformation.
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