Fakey: A Game Intervention to Improve News Literacy on Social Media

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DOI

To improve news literacy and consequently reduce the harm of misinformation, we designed and developed a game that emulates a social media feed. We tracked user interactions with articles from mainstream and low-credibility sources during a 19-month deployment of the game. The game achieved its objective of priming players to be suspicious of questionable content. As players interacted with more articles, they significantly improved their skills in spotting mainstream content, thus confirming the utility of the game for improving news literacy. Semi-structured interviews revealed that the players found the game to be simple, fun and educational. The principles and mechanisms used by the game could serve to inform social media functionality that helps people distinguish between credible and questionable content they encounter in their news feeds.