FakeYou! - A Gamified Approach for Building and Evaluating Resilience Against Fake News

Clever Lena, Assenmacher Dennis, Müller Kilian, Seiler Moritz V, Riehle Dennis M, Preuss Mike, Grimme Christian


Abstract

Nowadays fake news are heavily discussed in public and political debates. Even though the phenomenon of intended false information is rather old, misinformation reaches a new level with the rise of the internet and participatory platforms. Due to Facebook and Co., purposeful false information - often called fake news - can be easily spread by everyone. Because of high data volatility and variety in content types (text, images,...) debunking of fake news is a complex challenge. This is especially true for automated approaches, which are prone to fail validating the veracity of the information. This Work focuses on a gamified approach to strengthen the resilience of consumers towards fake news. The game FakeYou motivates its players to critically analyze headlines regarding their trustworthiness. Further, the game follows a “learning by doing strategy”: by generating own fake headlines, users should experience the concepts of convincing fake headline formulations. We introduce the game itself, as well as the underlying technical infrastructure. A first evaluation study shows, that users tend to use specific stylistic devices to generate fake news. Further, the results indicate, that creating good fakes and identifying correct headlines are challenging and hard to learn.

Keywords
Fake news; News; Game; Mobile game; Misinformation



Publication type
Research article in proceedings (conference)

Peer reviewed
Yes

Publication status
Published

Year
2020

Conference
2nd Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media

Venue
Leiden

Book title
Disinformation in Open Online Media. Second Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2020, Leiden, The Netherlands, October 26–27, 2020, Proceedings

Editor
van Duijn, Max; Preuss, Mike; Spaiser, Viktoria; Takes, Frank; Verberne, Suzan

Start page
218

End page
232

Volume
12259

Title of series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Publisher
Springer

Place
Cham

Language
English

ISSN
0302-9743

ISBN
978-3-030-61841-4

DOI