Source: Harmony Square Harmony Square is a free online game financially supported by The U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with DROG and the University of Cambridge. The game puts the player in the role of community disinformation officer….
Source: Troll Factory I’m pretty apprehensive on sharing this site. It was designed to teach people on how social media can be used to enrage others, but the language and themes are very inappropriate for 10 graders and below. Juniors and Seniors may see value in the site, but I would get parental permission first….
Russia’s disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential election rocked social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to their core. Now, kids attending the Defcon conference are learning how to create their own bot army. But the organizers behind the r00tz Asylum, Defcon’s kid-friendly event, say there’s no cause for alarm. The goal isn’t to launch a new flurry…
Fact checking has its origin in the early 20th century when magazines began to verify statements made in non-fictional texts prior to publication. But the impact of fake news has soared in recent years. This means that ordinary people are increasingly skeptical of what they read online and hear from others. So in the…
In 2016, Tristan Harris, whose job title at Google was “design ethicist,” left the company to focus on a new nonprofit he called Time Well Spent. The goal of Time Well Spent is to reverse what it calls “the digital attention crisis” — the brilliant minds at Google, Apple, Facebook, and elsewhere who “hijack our minds”…
Factitious is an online game to help people recognize fake news. This would be a great way to teach students how to check sources and identify fake news sites.
The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds:…
Bad News is a Twine-style game designed by members of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and media literacy group Drog. Its goal is to teach players about digital misinformation by turning them into purveyors of it. You’ll start with a small-time Twitter account and slowly build followers by feeding their appetite for fear and anger,…
One important skill that students need to learn is to how to view a website and critically evaluate its validity. A site that has been around for awhile is Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division, a website that shows the danger of water. Another site I stumbled across this week is Chemtrail Vaccines, a website that “sells” a vaccine…