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Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media

MISDOOM 2020: Disinformation in Open Online Media pp 218–232Cite as

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

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 12259)

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

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://breakyourownnews.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.mimikama.at.

  3. 3.

    https://getbadnews.com/.

  4. 4.

    See: https://ionicframework.com/.

  5. 5.

    See: https://angular.io/.

  6. 6.

    See: https://www.nginx.com/.

  7. 7.

    See: https://www.djangoproject.com/.

  8. 8.

    See: https://www.mysql.com/de/.

  9. 9.

    See: https://scrapy.org/.

  10. 10.

    For normalization the number of fake/correct headlines containing the character or punctuation is divided by the total number of fake/correct headlines.

  11. 11.

    Fooling two opponents in each of the three rounds sums up in a maximum fake score of 18 (= (3 + 3) * 3).

  12. 12.

    Betting the correct headline three times in a game leads to a maximum correct bet score of 6 (= 2 * 3).

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Acknowlegments

The research leading to these results received funding by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany (Project: PropStop, FKZ 16KIS0495K), the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the European Regional Development Fund (EFRE.NRW 2014–2020, Project: MODERAT!, No. CM-2-2-036a), and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (Project: DemoResil, FKZ 005-1709-0001, EFRE-0801431). All authors appreciate the support of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, University of Münster, Leonardo-Campus 3, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Lena Clever, Dennis Assenmacher, Kilian Müller, Moritz Vinzent Seiler, Dennis M. Riehle & Christian Grimme

  2. University of Leiden, Niels Bohrweg 1, 2333 CA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Mike Preuss

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  1. Lena Clever
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  2. Dennis Assenmacher
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  3. Kilian Müller
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  4. Moritz Vinzent Seiler
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  5. Dennis M. Riehle
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  7. Christian Grimme
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lena Clever .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Max van Duijn

  2. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Mike Preuss

  3. School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Viktoria Spaiser

  4. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Frank Takes

  5. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Suzan Verberne

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Clever, L. et al. (2020). FakeYou! - A Gamified Approach for Building and Evaluating Resilience Against Fake News. In: van Duijn, M., Preuss, M., Spaiser, V., Takes, F., Verberne, S. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12259. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_15

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