Fakey!

I am scheduled to teach digital and media literacy next semester and am hunting for good practical tools to develop my students' online literacy skills.

In my research I came across Fakey, a game developed by the Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe, pronounced awesome). It teaches the players to recognize fake news by analyzing its presentation, headline styles, pictures, clickbate vs factual text, etc.

I played it anonymously 6 times in a row and quite liked it. My highest score was 98/100, two points lost after liking rather than sharing a post from a trusted source (Bloomberg). I started out with a relatively low score of 54/100 only because I was too lazy to go over the tutorial and was trying to figure out what skills the game was aiming at developing by simply playing it. My score improved with every next round as I was getting the hang of it.

Before I played the last time, I did go to the tutorial to see if my gut feeling about the game was correct. It was, for the most part, I just didn't factor in that it would take small points off for asking for a hint and liking rather than sharing the post. Once I got the logic of the game completely, I achieved the score of 98/100.

There are certain limitations to the game. I'll give you a couple of examples. It qualifies RT (Russia Today, Putin's official propaganda channel for foreign audiences broadcasting in all official UN languages) as an untrustworthy source. I fully agree with this categorization. But even untrustworthy sources can publish objective facts. In this case, the game included a story from RT about Putin's appointment of Alexander Khinstein as the Kursk Region Governor. I knew for a fact that it had happened in reality so I "liked" the post. But because RT is automatically qualified as an untrustworthy source, I've lost over 20 points.

The same thing happened when I "liked" a factual post about Modi's grievances with the American foreign policy from an Indian right-wing online news portal supporting Modi. Even though the reported information was factual and true, I lost points for liking a post from the untrustworthy source.

I guess the lesson to keep in mind if you decide to play the game is that the game is geared toward determining when NOT to share or like information in your social media feeds because they come from untrustworthy sources rather than evaluating the quality of the post and factual information that may be presented in it.

I'm not sure how I feel about it as I believe that even generally untrustworthy sources can be reliable when they just report news and facts, without interpretation or commentary. But that's how the game was designed, I guess. If you are not sure about the trustworthiness of the source when you play it, just click on that "Hint" button. You will lose several points but it will give you a pretty good clue as to whether you should share or fact-check the post, which will give you the most points.

What I liked about the game is that it uses the real and current examples and includes international sources of news and information. It also gives examples of posts that are pure clickbates and conspiracy theories presented as legitimate news. Recognizing them is not simple even for media savvy people, so in this case practice literally makes perfect.

I decided to play anonymously this time because I just wanted to see how the game works. However, when I share this tool with my students next semester I will play it through my Google account (I deleted my Twitter account a long time ago) so that my achievement stats can be shared with my students as well. It will also help OSoMe to improve the game, and what I wouldn't do to help out fellow academics, right? OSoMe has some other awesome research and visualization tools that I will explore later.

If you decide to give the game a try, here's the link: