Maggie Maloney / September 6,2024 / MCO427
Blog Assignment #2
For this week’s blog, we’re going to evaluate Rumor Guard and Bad News.
Rumor Guard is a news literacy project that checks the validity of viral posts. The site itself has several different categories that you can look at. Recent checks are categorized into different types of topics that they’re tracking and verifying for authenticity.
What I really like about this site is that it provides five categories that it looks at to authenticate information. Alongside those categories, it breaks down the techniques it utilizes to verify whether information is true.
I think that including the techniques the site uses to authenticate information is crucial. Not only does the site provide the ways in which it verifies information, but it also offers lessons so that individuals can learn how to verify information on their own.
Not only are you able to learn from a broad spectrum about how to verify information, but the site also provides recently trending topics and posts that have already gone through the verification process.
One of the recent checks on Rumor Guard from September 4, 2024, shares partisan accounts of fabricated claims portraying Vice President Kamala Harris as a communist. A growing misinformation trend in the 2024 presidential race is the use of fabricated images to falsely portray Vice President Kamala Harris as a member of the Communist Party.
In each evaluation, Rumor Guard provides a snapshot and a quick overview of the authentication or validity of a story. In this instance, not all five categories of authenticity are applicable, but evidence, context, and reasoning can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” For categories that do not have an answer, nothing is provided. However, it does show that the authenticity of a post is questionable if it did not originate from a credible source or if there is no evidence to prove the claim.
At the bottom of the evaluation, the site shows the techniques that were utilized to verify the story. As someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time on social media, I took the liberty of doing a quick search on Facebook to see how many posts supported this false claim.
One such post that popped up on my feed was from Judicial Watch, detailing Kamala Harris’s alleged communist ties. At the time of this post, it had over 410 reactions and 126 comments.
My overall evaluation of the Rumor Guard site is that it’s a great resource to stay up to date on information that may or may not be accurate. I also think that it’s good to learn how to spot misinformation and that we should always seek to verify what is accurate.
For this reason, I feel that Rumor Guard is very effective in teaching participants of the site about identifying misinformation.
The second resource we are going to look at today is Bad News. Bad News is an interactive misinformation game. Looking at the main page, I have already made some assumptions about the effectiveness of this game in teaching participants about identifying misinformation.
When the game starts, you begin with 50% credibility and 0 followers. During the game, it shows you how to post controversial things to gain more followers. Initially, an outrage post drops your credibility down to 0 and gets you about two followers. As you continue through the game, you focus on six components of spreading misinformation.
At one point, the game asks if you want to create fake news. It then warns you against making fake news and the downside of doing that. It recommends posting against emotion on real news, so you don’t get caught in an obvious lie.
After going through all six stages of spreading misinformation and gaining followers, the game does provide a few headlines asking if the headline is misleading. I was a little confused by this portion of the game. This part of the game did appear to be trying to teach you how to identify misleading headlines; however, the bulk of the game was teaching you how to create chaos and spread misinformation.
Not proud of the score, but I was able to obtain 15.9K followers by spreading misinformation. Though I do believe that this game helps to support many of the readings from our course materials.
The game made me think of the article from Biological Conservation, “Why Facts Don’t Change Minds” by Toomey, A.H. In the article, it shares that a large amount of information can be cognitively taxing, which leads people to believe intuition vs hard facts. In my opinion this game helps simulate how this can happen on social media.
Overall, I do not think that this game was a good source for teaching participants how to identify misinformation.
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