Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy

fpjl2 — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 08:54:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��free-to-play Harmony Square is released to the public today, along with a study on its effectiveness published in the Harvard Misinformation Review.

It has been created by ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge psychologists with support from the US Department of State's Global Engagement Center and Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

̽��ֱ��gameplay is based on 'inoculation theory': that exposing people to a weak 'dose' of common techniques used to spread fake news allows them to better identify and disregard misinformation when they encounter it in future.

In this case, by understanding how to incite political division in the game using everything from bots and conspiracies to fake experts, players get a form of 'psychological vaccine' against the product of these techniques in the real world.

“Trying to debunk misinformation after it has spread is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. By pre-bunking, we aim to stop the spread of fake news in the first place,” said Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making lab and senior author of the new study.

Twitter has started using a “pre-bunk” approach: highlighting types of fake news likely to be encountered in feeds during the US election. However, researchers argue that familiarising people with techniques behind misinformation builds a 'general inoculation', reducing the need to rebut each individual conspiracy.

In the 10-minute game Harmony Square, a small town neighbourhood 'obsessed with democracy' comes under fire as players bait the square’s 'living statute', spread falsehoods about its candidate for 'bear controller', and set up a disreputable online news site to attack the local TV anchor.

“ ̽��ֱ��game itself is quick, easy and tongue-in-cheek, but the experiential learning that underpins it means that people are more likely to spot misinformation, and less likely to share it, next time they log on to Facebook or YouTube,” said Dr Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge psychologist and lead author of the study.

Over the course of four short levels, users learn about five manipulation techniques: trolling to provoke outrage; exploiting emotional language to create anger and fear; artificially amplifying reach through bots and fake followers; creating and spreading conspiracy theories; polarizing audiences.

In a randomised controlled trial, researchers took 681 people and asked them to rate the reliability of a series of news and social media posts: some real, some misinformation, and even some faked misinformation created for the study, in case participants had already come across real-world examples.

They gave roughly half the sample Harmony Square to play, while the other half played Tetris, and then asked them to rate another series of news posts.

̽��ֱ��perceived reliability of misinformation dropped an average of 16% in those who completed Harmony Square compared to their assessment prior to playing. ̽��ֱ��game also reduced willingness to share fake news with others by 11%. Importantly, the players’ own politics – whether they leaned left or right – made no difference.

Having the 'control group' who played Tetris allowed the scientists to determine an 'effect size' of 0.54 for the study, said Van der Linden.

“ ̽��ֱ��effect size suggests that if the population was split equally like the study sample, 63% of the half that played the game would go on to find misinformation significantly less reliable, compared to just 37% of the half left to navigate online information without the inoculation of Harmony Square,” he said.

̽��ֱ��project follows other playful attempts by CISA to illustrate how 'foreign influencers' use disinformation to target 'hot button' issues. A previous demonstration took the example of whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

However, Harmony Square is based on the findings of a number of studies from the Cambridge team showing how similar gamified approaches to digital literacy significantly reduce susceptibility to fake news and online conspiracies.

̽��ֱ��team behind the game, which includes the Dutch media agency DROG and designers Gusmanson, have recently worked with the UK Cabinet Office on Go Viral!, an intervention that specifically tackles conspiracies around COVID-19.

Harmony Square is geared towards the politically charged misinformation that has plagued many democracies over the last decade. “ ̽��ֱ��aftermath of this week’s election day is likely to see an explosion of dangerous online falsehoods as tensions reach fever pitch,” said van der Linden.

“Fake news and online conspiracies will continue to chip away at the democratic process until we take seriously the need to improve digital media literacy across populations. ̽��ֱ��effectiveness of interventions such as Harmony Square are a promising start,” he said.

A short online game in which players are recruited as a 'Chief Disinformation Officer' and use tactics such as trolling to sabotage elections in a peaceful town has been shown to reduce susceptibility to political misinformation in its users.

Fake news and online conspiracies will continue to chip away at the democratic process until we take seriously the need to improve digital media literacy across populations

Sander van der Linden

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Scientists ‘must not become complacent’ when assessing pandemic threat from flu viruses

cjb250 — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 12:30:00 +0000

Influenza pandemics arise when a new virus strain – against which humans have yet to develop widespread immunity – spreads in the human population. There have been five such pandemics in the past 100 years, the worst of which – the 1918 Spanish Flu – cost 50 million lives worldwide. Of these pandemics, three are thought to have spread from birds and one from pigs. However, pandemic influenza strains represent only a tiny fraction of the total diversity of influenza viruses that exist in nature; the threats posed by the majority of these viruses are poorly understood. Assessing which viruses pose the greatest risk of causing the next human pandemic is an enormous challenge.

Steven Riley from Imperial College London, an author of the study, says: “There are too many strains of influenza viruses out there in non-human hosts to make it feasible to make preparations against each one. Instead, we need to get better at assessing the pandemic risks so that we know where best to focus our efforts. At the moment, this assessment is largely driven by a simple idea: animal viruses that cause sporadic human infections pose a greater risk than viruses that have not been documented to infect humans. But in fact, none of the viruses that caused the major pandemics of the last century were detected in humans before they emerged in their pandemic form.”

Writing in the journal eLife, the scientists set out the steps that they consider necessary to increase our ability to assess pandemic risk. As influenza virus genome sequencing becomes cheaper, faster and more readily available, the data it generates has the potential to transform the research community’s ability to predict the pandemic risk. However, it remains extremely difficult to predict just from a virus’s genome what symptoms it will elicit in its host – and hence how deadly the virus is. ̽��ֱ��researchers call for better integration of experimental data, computational methods and mathematical models, in conjunction with refinements to surveillance methodology.

However, they say that scientific insights into non‐human influenza viruses must not give way to complacency that the most substantial threats have been identified and characterized. They point out that several recent strains including the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic virus and the recently emerged H7N9 viruses in China highlight the importance of remaining vigilant against as-yet unrecognized high risk viruses and the value of surveillance for influenza viruses in humans.

“No one can say with anything close to a hundred percent certainty when or where the next pandemic will start or which virus will cause it,” says Dr Colin Russell from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. “We are getting much better at identifying and assessing potential threats, but we must be vigilant about surprises lurking around the corner.

“We need to be prepared for a swift response, with coordinated action, to help mitigate the spread of the next pandemic virus. Without developing this ability to respond, we will have spent billions building systems just for watching the next pandemic unfold.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics program of the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health.

Reference
Russell, CA et al. Improving pandemic influenza risk assessment. eLife; 15 Oct 2015

As our ability to assess the pandemic risk from strains of influenza virus increases with the latest scientific developments, we must not allow ourselves to become complacent that the most substantial threats have been identified, argue an international consortium of scientists.

We are getting much better at identifying and assessing potential threats, but we must be vigilant about surprises lurking around the corner

Colin Russell

MIKI Yoshihito

New influenza viruses (cropped)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy

Scientists ‘must not become complacent’ when assessing pandemic threat from flu viruses