Misinformation Educational Tools
- braedensteele
- Apr 5
- 5 min read
Blog Post Assignment #2
In this week's blog post assignment, the class was instructed to analyze some education tools and games created to educate people about misinformation. One of the tools was News Literacy Project's RumorGuard Service, and the other was a series of educational games. I chose the game "Breaking Harmony Square." Here is how both experiences went.
Harmony Square
Harmony Square is a game that is based around the idea that you have been hired as the Chief Disinformation Officer of a place called Harmony Square. The goal is for you to build a site and profile that spreads misinformation and sows division among the residents of Harmony Square. You start the game with a brief survey that asks you to rate the truthfulness of statements on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being not truthful at all, and 7 being 100 percent trustworthy. After that, you create a fake identity on a disinformation website, and begin to post things that rile people up. For example, a swan escaped a zoo, which has effectively no controversy, and create one by posting about how no one show care about a stupid swan. This makes people argue over something that no one previously cared all that much about, and suddenly have a strong opinion regarding the swan. Also the game contains a news ticker that shows all the present news in Harmony Square, and throughout the game it gets progressively more inflammatory and false.
You go through 4 chapters in the game, each one having you become more and more powerful in the game. Throughout you continue to post false or misleading info, causing Harmony Square to become more and more divided. This includes accusing a woman named Ashley to be corrupt, and starting an online feud over apricots vs pineapples. It contains a follower count as well to show how much influence you are gaining throughout the game.
By the end of the game, Harmony Square is left in ruins because of the division and chaos you sowed. You also encourage some of your followers to "take action," which causes them to throw tomatoes at a pineapple art exhibit, which causes the vice president to cancel a visit to the town out of safety concerns. This could be seen as a clear metaphor for other acts that have happened because of social media encouragement.
Rumor Guard
Rumor Guard is a tool that helps expose misinformation and fake news. This ranges from fake social media posts, fake images, fake quotes, and AI imagery posing as genuine photography. To evaluate content for false info, Rumor Guard uses 5 specific factors: authenticity, source, evidence, context and reasoning.
Rumor Guard also comes with an up-to-date section of recent news that was fact-checked and found to be false. For example, an image showing a picture of someone dressed as the Pokemon character Pikachu at a Protest in Turkey was AI-generated. This one made me a little dumbfounded, because while there was a protest in Turkey that featured someone dressed as Pikachu, many of the images of that person were not real, including one that showed other characters such as Batman and Joker standing on police cars and charging at police. I reference this image specifically because not only did I see this image a couple weeks ago, and think this was image was real, I also sent it to a friend because I thought it was real. I even put underneath it "this is real." That's embarrassing to know I did that.
The goal of Rumor Guard is to inform the public of fake or misleading information to help prevent them from believing it and potentially spreading it as real info. This makes sense because its founder, the News Literacy Project, is a nonprofit was created to help people become more literate with the news they see and consume, especially among students. Their website gives more info on why they were created and what their goals are.
Conclusion
I think that games and tools like Harmony Square and Rumor Guard are great to educate people on the dangers of misinformation, and how to spot it. Harmony Square is especially great to teach younger kids in my opinion, because it uses rather harmless topics (pineapple vs apricots and tomato throwing) and social media follower count to show kids how simply posting fake stuff online can lead to real-world consequences. The tool has been successful too according to gamesforchange.org. In their article, Games for Change says Harmony Square has been very successful at helping people spot false information. In it, they say that they found that: "People who play Harmony Square find manipulative social media content significantly less reliable after playing compared to a control group... People who played Harmony Square are significantly more confident in their ability to spot manipulative content in social media posts, compared to a control group... People who played Harmony Square are significantly less likely to share manipulative content with others."
Rumor Guard also helps people by not only showing them false information, but explaining how they knew it was false with their five factors. This can encourage others to use these factors when evaluating something for truth. Rumor Guard really shows the importance fo news literacy in today's day and age. According to the Missouri Independent, the primary goals of news literacy is to stop the spread of misinformation by identifying trustworthy and untrustworthy news sources, and also to "inspire citizens, educators and students to learn how to become smart consumers of information."
I think Rumor Guard succeeds at both of these, and it even helped me to identify one in my life! Both Rumor Guard and Harmony Square are engaging, well-designed, and positive for people to use. And, in my opinion, they work at inspiring news literacy.
References
Ellis, J. (2023, January 23). News media literacy is more important than ever. Missouri Independent. https://missouriindependent.com/2023/01/23/news-media-literacy-is-more-important-than-ever/
Baralis, C. (2021, May 14). Harmony Square – Exposing Disinformation Tactics and Techniques - Games for Change. Games for Change. https://www.gamesforchange.org/blog_posts/harmony-square-exposing-disinformation-tactics-and-techniques/
Zaleznik, D. (2021, July). Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - Harvard Law School | Systemic Justice Project. Harvard Law School | Systemic Justice Project. https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/
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